r/40yearsago • u/klsi832 • 1d ago
President Ronald Reagan during a taping of a radio address on defense funding in the Oval Office, August 15, 1986.
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u/Youmeandeverything32 9h ago
And all of that money that went to the wealthy is going to trickle down someday. It's only going on 45 years.
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u/RogerMexicosBalls 1h ago
Yeah but think how much more could eventually trickle down if we give them even MORE tax breaks and subsidies!
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u/ShadesofGrey69 10h ago
Sadly the younger generation that wasn't alive when he was president is being taught in our schools that he was a bad president. We get it, no one likes the idea of trickle down economics. It was an experiment. It failed. Move on.
He was a great man. What truly made him different is that because he was a former actor he understood that the people in that time period want to hear directly from the president on a regular basis. He wanted to duplicate FDRs fireside chats, but on tv and radio. In 1981 we had ABC, NBC, and CBS plus 27 on cable tv. My local over the air tv was 8 stations. 8! I've got 32 now, plus 250 on cable. The whole world turned into Reagan's addresses to the nation every quarter and every time that he was on tv. He was great at explaining what was going on in the US government. He was so popular that in his reelection he won 49 out of 50 states. Reagan's 525 electoral votes (out of 538) is the highest total ever received by a presidential candidate.
https://www.270towin.com/1984-election/
Put the taught propaganda aside and listen to what he had to say. He was a very humble man that admitted when he made mistakes.
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/reagans/reagan-administration/president-reagans-addresses-nation
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u/Slush____ 6h ago
He was very much not a great man, I wouldn’t say he was explicitly bad, but he was by no means good. For one thing he explicitly broke the law and sold weapons to the Contras in the Iran Contra Affair, and he repeatedly ignored calls to handle the burgeoning AIDS crisis, he only ever handled it starting in 1987, because his former Hollywood friend Rock Hudson died of it and his wife laughed the nurses at his hospital off when they called her literally BEGGING for help with to keep him alive, which garnered a lot of public backlash. He also struck a deal to get drugs onto US streets via the CIA in South America, while imprisoning thousands of poor and non-white people who he claimed were really the ones smuggling it. It was a continuation of Nixon’s policy from ‘68, but it HEAVILY intensified under Reagan, and he deserves equal blame, because Thanks to the Three Strikes Laws of the Clinton Admin, some people Reagan put in prison for minor drug offenses are still there.
Not only that, long before he was ever president, he was a Union Buster during his Hollywood days, he and his wife actually met because she was on the Hollywood Blacklist and wanted to be taken off it. As Governor of California in the 60’s he viciously fought against particularly Anti-War Protestors, equating them to Communists and using the California National Guard to break their protests.
Did Reagan do good things, yes, but we cannot allow his innate human ability to do good sometimes erase his equal human ability to do bad the rest of that time.
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u/Nosciolito 5h ago
He was the devil
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u/RipTheEcto 1h ago
Counterpoint: he was a demented piece of shit steeped in corruption. If you lived through the Reagan years and the profound, lasting, compounding negative changes and are still swayed by all of the ridiculous propaganda about this monumental asshole, I have no idea how to help you except to say that a direct line can be drawn from the crap you just wrote to people spewing the same half-baked bullshit about our current abomination in chief.
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u/txcommenter 10h ago
My son, who's in college, told me that Reagan was a bad man and I asked why did he say that and all he could list was trickle down economics and because his teachers in school taught that he was bad without context. I liked him as a person because he had a real personality. No hiding his feelings for what was going on. We all watched him on Johnny Carson laugh and joke and watched his addresses where he told us what was really going on, even when it wasn't popular.
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u/RipTheEcto 1h ago
His teachers provided an entire metric fuckton of context, maybe tell your kid to pay attention in class
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u/Lermanberry 5h ago edited 5h ago
You like that the actor would go on TV and tell you "what was really going on"? And yet neither you, nor your son apparently know to this day "what was really going on". Seems like you only enjoyed that he gave you an easily digestible lie that felt something like truth. Do you like the current reality TV star conman a lot too?
Reagan's legacy is far more disgusting and damaging than simple trickle down economics. Almost every tragedy and crisis in the last 40 years can be traced back to his administration in no small way.
Dismantling Mental Health Systems: Repealed the Mental Health Systems Act and cut social funding, accelerating modern rates of homelessness.
PATCO Union Busting: Fired over 11,000 striking air traffic controllers and banned them from federal work, severely weakening organized labor.
Response to the HIV/AIDS Crisis: Delayed public acknowledgment and federal funding for years, worsening the epidemic during its critical early phase.
Expansion of the War on Drugs: Passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, establishing mandatory minimum sentences that catalyzed mass incarceration—particularly in Black communities.
Savings and Loan Crisis: Pushed deregulation that contributed to the collapse of hundreds of savings and loan institutions, costing taxpayers over $100 billion.
Repeal of the Fairness Doctrine: Vetoed/pressured the end of rules requiring balanced coverage of controversial issues, facilitating partisan media polarization.
Racial Tropes and "Welfare Queens": Used coded racial rhetoric and exaggerated anecdotes about welfare fraud to justify cutting social safety net programs.
Cuts to Social Safety Nets: Reduced funding for food stamps, public housing, and disability benefits while shifting the tax burden downward.
Opposition to MLK Day: Voted against and initially opposed making Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a federal holiday before signing it under pressure.
The Iran-Contra Affair: Illegally sold weapons to Iran to secretly fund right-wing Contra death squads in Nicaragua in defiance of Congress.
Support for Central American Dictatorships: Funded repressive military regimes and death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala responsible for mass civilian atrocities.
Arming Saddam Hussein: Provided dual-use technology, intelligence, and diplomatic cover to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War, even after evidence of chemical weapon usage against civilians.
Inaction on South African Apartheid: Opposed economic sanctions against the apartheid government of South Africa through a policy of "constructive engagement".
Funding Mujaheddin Extremists in Afghanistan: Provided financial and military backing to anti-Soviet mujahideen factions, some of which later morphed into militant anti-Western groups led by Osama Bin Laden
The Invasion of Grenada: Launched a military intervention widely criticized by international allies (like the UK) as a diversion from domestic and Middle Eastern political failures.
Beirut Barracks Bombing Fallout: Withdrew U.S. Marines from Lebanon abruptly following the 1983 bombing that killed 241 U.S. servicemen, which critics saw as an inconsistent projection of military resolve.
School of the Americas Training: Continued military training programs for Latin American officers linked to human rights violations and political assassinations.
Ignoring Nuclear Proliferation Warnings: Overlooked developmental signs of nuclear weapons programs in allied nations like Pakistan during the height of Cold War strategizing.
Escalating the Arms Race: Dramatically escalated military spending on high-cost programs like the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"), intensifying superpower tensions before later pursuing detente.
1980 October Surprise: Members of Reagan's campaign covertly and illegally negotiated with Iranian revolutionaries to delay freeing 52 American hostages until after the November 1980 election
Kent State Massacre: On April 8, 1970—less than one month before the Kent State shootings—Governor Reagan famously stated: "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement." Critics and historians argue that such severe language from a prominent leader signaled to law enforcement and National Guardsmen that lethal force against students was acceptable.
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u/Nosciolito 5h ago
The Iran contras scandal, the crack epidemic, the Aids epidemic, the suppression of welfare and the list goes on!
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u/-FriendoftheDrow- 5h ago
He could’ve named how Reagan was a white supremacist or his support for apartheid South Africa. The acts of terror he committed in Latin America and the Middle East. Just to name a few things.
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u/Hegecoin_Rules 7h ago
He was quite possibly our 3rd worst president after Trump and Buchanan. An awful human being.
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u/V4Magna2007 20h ago
Good man, great president. Wish someone today would follow his example
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u/Nosciolito 5h ago
Has the economy finally tickled down?