"The Great Days of Ronald Reagan"

[suziedemocrat]

I just heard Mitt Romney say that. Problem is, I don't remember the 1980's as great. I graduated in 1985 and the job market for recent grads was very tight. I DO remember the 1990's as being pretty great. Most of my friends had well paying jobs and were enjoying life.

I'm not saying this as an endorsement of Clinton. I am saying this because I don't really like Clinton OR Obama, but I don't want to go back to the "great days of Ronald Reagan."

[bluerum]

1. For a repuglican those are good times - when the "workforce" begs to do any

job for next to nothing it's a good economy.

[Deja Q]

6. Then how come India's and China's economies are booming?

Again, not many H1Bs are coming here with guns pressed against their heads.

They certainly see a future...

[Deja Q]

10. One other note, someone on DU once told me

"If you do what you love, money won't matter and you'll want for nothing".

Technically true... though I don't mind wanting, amongst other things, food...

[bluerum]

18. "Good economy" - It's relative, isn't it?

[Darth_Kitten]

2. Yeah, Reagan and his pals had GREAT days.......

but things rathered sucked for most other people.

:(

[Deja Q]

3. Eisenhower's days seemed best. I loved the 1950s...

When more people are giving a living wage, EVERYONE is happy, productivity goes up, quality goes up, the economy grows because more people can save and spend.

(So when people say I wish it was like the 1950s; now they won't need to not ask me any longer. The economy being the reason why and not whatever myopic self-absorbed garbage they like to project. :D )

[baldguy]

4. Next they'll harken back to the Golden Age of the Hoover Administration.

[HelenWheels]

5. 1980 jobs

My kids graduated from college in the 80s' and had a very hard time finding jobs.

[TexasObserver]

7. All the Republicans were high in the 1980s

Booze and cocaine mainly.

[Danger Mouse]

8. Romney wants SO BAD to take up Reagan's torch.

He must never reach the white house.
We must win in 08.

[fasttense]

9. I remember the days of Reagan too.

I remember him doubling our Social Security taxes and then turning around and borrowing from our trust fund. I remember him saying the trust fund would solve all social security problems.

I remember being the first generation in history to not only pay for my parent's retirement but have to pay for my own retirement at the same time. Yet I was not assured that the money would be there when I retired because the government was borrowing it.

I remember him telling me I couldn't trust the government, yet he promised me my social security money would be returned after he borrowed it.

I remember that the social security trust fund didn't have enough money in it for Reagan so he borrowed more to create the biggest budget deficit in history (until the bushes came along).

I remember when Reagan couldn't even answer questions from the media because he would get so messed up about the facts.

I remember Ollie North (I was the same rank as he at the time and I never broke the law).

I remember when I had to pay 13% interest on my mortgage and thought I was getting a deal.

I remember when homeless people started increasing in an exponential rate.

I remember when he broke the backs of the Unions (I guess you didn't have any Union friends).

[BuelahWitch]

12. Don't forget "Ketchup is a vegetable"

And how he refused to appropriate money for AIDS research because he thought it was "a gay man's disease."

-signed,

Another With a Good Memory of the Disastrous Reagan Administration

[suziedemocrat]

16. Good Post. Yeah, those were "great" times!

[BleedingHeartPatriot]

11. Those were bleak days. The Junk bond traders were making tons of money,

the rest of us were struggling to make ends meet.

At least Michael Milkin was convicted for his role in that mess.

Mass layoffs. Small towns with business windows boarded up.

That was when Jerry Falwell really got up and going with the "silent majority" meme, what a crock that was. At least I now know, with absolute certainty, that less than 30% of our country is comprised of hard line RWers, but at the time Falwell was stroking their egos, and wallets, convincing them that their horror at uppity women, uppity blacks, uppity latinos, uppity gays and uppity teenagers was shared by most of the country.

James Watt was destroying the natural landscape as quickly as possible, via his Sec'y of Interior post, there was so much covert military action going on in Central America, it was hard to keep track.

Iran/Contra was a national punch in the gut. And, watching Reagan's faculties diminish did nothing to ease concerns about his finger on the "button". Sound familiar?

Reagan explained to us on a regular basis how the USSR was just waiting to launch those warheads, and we got "The Day After" on our TeeVees to drive the point home.

One difference, the news outlets were still providing good coverage of domestic and international events, and CNN was the place to turn for "just the facts", nothing glitzy, just reporting on the latest events in a pretty objective manner.

Oh yeah, 300 plus Marines were blown up in Lebanon. :cry:

Our navy shot down an Iranian airliner. The Soviets shot down a KAL jumbo jet.

What was good about it again?

[THUNDER HANDS]

13. I don't think the 90s were that much better than the 80s

I think the early 90s were interesting for what was going on in music and culture, the late 90s were interesting for what was going on in technology. But the dot-com crash proved that the 90's economy wasn't very stable at all and built on the backs of speculative technology and fast and free credit purchases.

But overall, I think the 90s were slightly better than the 80s, at least for me. But I was a kid during the 80s. I turned 13 in 1990.

[halobeam]

14. Just the other day a WaPo article shined a light on some real Reagan facts

thought this might be helpful.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/31/AR2008013102154.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
--clip

But the biggest fairy tale about Reagan is the most central one: about taxes and spending. It is one thing to sit in a North Vietnamese prison in the early 1970s, dreaming of a California governor who one day will balance the federal budget. It is another to imagine that it actually happened. When Reagan took office in 1981, federal receipts (taxes) were $517 billion and outlays (spending) were $591 billion for a deficit of $73 billion. When he left office in 1989, taxes were $999 billion and spending was $1.14 trillion, for a deficit of $153 billion. As a share of the economy (the fairest measure), Reagan did cut taxes, from 19.6 percent to 18.4 percent, and he cut spending from 22.2 to 21.2 percent, increasing the deficit from 2.6 percent to 2.8 percent. The deficit went as high as an incredible five percent of GDP during Reagan's term. As a result, the national debt soared by almost two thirds.

[BlueJazz]

15. Anybody remember that the Minimum Wage stayed the same ....

...during the "Wonderful Reagan years" ??

[suziedemocrat]

17. Yeah, because after I graduated from college I made minimum wage for a few years.

edit to add: It made it hard to pay back my student loans at the super-low 9% interest rate.

[BlueJazz]

19. I understand......After I got my degree in Physics, I worked in a number...

...of service jobs.
I always knew that I'd be "moving up" but I still felt bad for people who, I knew, would be stuck making peanuts for many years.
(and consequently, under Ronnie, would actually see their buying power decrease).