Work and Reagan
Feb. 6th, 2004 08:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
weaktwosThere are a few folks celebrating Ronald Reagan's birthday today, and touting him as the greatest President of this century. I don't buy it. As an economics major, I never appreciated his supply side economics, and it really didn't work that well. In fact, Reagan had to back peddle on supply side economics.
What is interesting to note the disparity between the rich and the poor grew, the deficit ballooned, 13 million more children fell below the poverty line, education began its decline. The average income of the top 1% increased by 70% and the average income of the poor went down by about 10%-20%. Does anyone remember that David Stockman under Reagan tried to make ketchup classified as a vegetable? How about Iran-Contra? How about ignoring Aids? And for being a fella who was so anti-government, the government did not seem any smaller after his term.
While surfing the net, I found this article, which struck me as intriguing.
Why are people so hell bent to call someone the greatest president, anyway? Where is there a standard criteria for this? Liberals and Conservatives are going to have a different take, and furthermore, each president has a different slough of problems they have to deal with. And he's only one third of the branch of government. To credit him with the success of our nation is to suggest that there is no balance of power in the government. That is a dangerous state of affairs indeed. Currently, of course, that may well be the case.
What is interesting to note the disparity between the rich and the poor grew, the deficit ballooned, 13 million more children fell below the poverty line, education began its decline. The average income of the top 1% increased by 70% and the average income of the poor went down by about 10%-20%. Does anyone remember that David Stockman under Reagan tried to make ketchup classified as a vegetable? How about Iran-Contra? How about ignoring Aids? And for being a fella who was so anti-government, the government did not seem any smaller after his term.
While surfing the net, I found this article, which struck me as intriguing.
Why are people so hell bent to call someone the greatest president, anyway? Where is there a standard criteria for this? Liberals and Conservatives are going to have a different take, and furthermore, each president has a different slough of problems they have to deal with. And he's only one third of the branch of government. To credit him with the success of our nation is to suggest that there is no balance of power in the government. That is a dangerous state of affairs indeed. Currently, of course, that may well be the case.
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