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Robert Jensen

Reagan's first speech as the GOP candidate was in Philadelphia, Mississippi. That was a town where 3 civil rights workers were murdered in the 1960s. This sent the message to the South that it was okay to long for the Jim Crow South.

He began the nasty meme with a prime example of "Welfare Queens". Not as objectionable as making fun of someone with cerebral palsy but unnecessary (unless of course you want to further the "Southern Strategy"). That along with firing all the air traffic control workers began the period of devaluing people by a President. It was okay to bust unions and devalue their labor.

He was president at the beginning of the trend towards a widening separation between wages and productivity. Wages actually went down during his Presidency relative to productivity.

He began a period of deregulation which during his term was limited apart from the Savings and Loan crisis which cost the US taxpayer billions (estimated at $124 billion which into today's dollars would be about $250 billion today

He appointed Donald Regan as Secretary of the Treasury. Regan had been the CEO of Merrill Lynch. What follows was a stream of investment bankers as head of Treasury. Deregulation and policy changes led to an unaccountable Wall Street where malfeasance was rewarded.

Iran/Contra

He removed the solar panels from the White House. This was consistent with a policy of disinvestment in the future of the United States. It took decades for infrastructure to deteriorate but it did. The country started to move from making things to wealth acquisition based on so called financial instruments.

He tripled the national debt.

He is credited with ending the Cold War. He was lucky because he was President during the culmination of 30+ years of bipartisan policy concerning the containment of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union could not compete with the US and 45 years after WW2 it dissolved. The US would have won that struggle with or without Reagan.

Reagan was transformational but not in a good way he was at the beginning of a trend that has led us to where we are today. If you consider him in the same league as Lincoln, Washington or FDR you clearly have a passion for middling movie stars.

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