I’ve said this innumerable times over the last ten years. It’s just more convincing when a Nobel Prize winning economist says it. Paul Krugman’s “Reagan Did It.”
For the more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn — the turn that made crisis inevitable — took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years.
Attacks on Reaganomics usually focus on rising inequality and fiscal irresponsibility. Indeed, Reagan ushered in an era in which a small minority grew vastly rich, while working families saw only meager gains. He also broke with longstanding rules of fiscal prudence. … The increase in public debt was, however, dwarfed by the rise in private debt, made possible by financial deregulation. The change in America’s financial rules was Reagan’s biggest legacy. And it’s the gift that keeps on taking. …
When Ronald Reagan signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act in 1982 it was the beginning of an era that would lead to where we are today. And by the turn of karmic justice, where we are today levels the final verdict on all things Reaganomics, but also the philosophy the Republicans continue to embrace.
It’s ironic that it was also Ronald Reagan who opened the door to invite the Jerry Falwell’s of this world into our politics, which led to people in groups like Operation Rescue, as well as the gullible right wing lunatics who listen to radio and drink up their violent swill by the gallons.
As we see GM enter bankruptcy through a lens that in the background shows pictures of a murdered doctor, it’s good to know when we turned into the direction we ended up in today.
There’s plenty of blame to go around these days. But the prime villains behind the mess we’re in were Reagan and his circle of advisers….
That last line excerpted above actually ends with the financial reckoning we’re now facing, but it just as easily could have stopped with what I offered, because it renders the proper verdict as it reads now.
Oh, and that goes for Pakistan too, because it was Reagan, after Carter’s initial funding, who allowed William Casey to build up the Taliban through Zia without a thought of what would happen later.
Reagan may have been charismatic, after all, people like me fell for him in 1980 –standing in gas lines in NYC, while hearing unending news reports about Iran and hostages, while donning sweaters, didn’t seem like leadership to me– but by 1982 it was clear. There was no there there.
So when Barack Obama touted Reagan during the primaries as being transformational all I could think was, He has to be saying that in a negative way, right? Not all “transformation” is good. Reaganism certainly was not.
So as long as Republicans pine for the Gipper’s good old days we all have to keep the watch. Because people have short memories and in America nostalgia is a trap.
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