thegreekdog wrote:In related news, it is common knowledge that the president has total control over the economy.
In the case of Reagan, two things happened. First, he got the benefit of some policies put in by Carter-- some policies regarding the Fed, etc (all of which he was loudly criticized for at the time, but which later politicians were happy to take credit for).
Second, he saw an upcoming economic boom. It was not about taxes, it was about tech, some things to do with interest rates overseas, etc. Seeing that boom, he thought he would gain some nice kudos by offering his big business cronies some nice benefits.. aka "trickle down". He was correct (make that his advisors were correct, but in a president.. amounts to the same thing) in that these cuts would be paid for by the phenomenal boom. Unfortunately, the rest of the story was forgotten.. i.e. that this works ONLY temporarily and that it was not really the taxes, it was changes in technology and other factors that really created the economic boom. The taxes just added to it, steered it a bit. BUT they also began the idea that its OK to give the big guys breaks and that it will all be "paid for later"... never mind that the little folks like us will be doing the paying! AND, yeah.. part of how he managed to balance that budget in his term was to steal our social security. (he called it borrowing money that was "just sitting", but part of our problem now is paying back the interest rate on that.
So, basically what Reagan himself did on the economic front was not all that bad at the time, it definitely set the stage for stupidity in the future, of which we are now paying for....
He also was in a good place to take advantage of the fall of the Soviet. The jury is out as to how much of it was truly due to Reagan, but such things are never fully due to one thing or another. If nothing else, he did not impede the demise of the USSR and for that deserves some credit. On the other hand, he pissed off a lot of people, particularly in the mideast. However, there, too, the blame cannot be rested on his shoulders alone by any means.
On the immigration front, several people here.. namely Phattscotty and Nightstrike, have things almost exactly backwards. You have to remember that Reagan's power base began in the west. Agriculture was still king in CA and Arizona, and a lot of that was very dependent upon illegal worker labor. His "genius"... though you have to rather read between the lines to get this from his fully public statements (He did speak more directly in venues that were semi-public, the type of meeting that nowadays would hit the internet in a few minutes, but that back then were largely kept out of public ears) was to know that other types of employers could "benefit" equally. At the time, the boom had created something of a labor shortage in the west, particularly (though not solely), so the outcry was not huge. Most people actually saw a benefit, except for the lowest wage workers who were mostly ignored. Even many of them largely did not begrudge someone else working hard and trying to get by.. at least at first.
THAT is why, a few years later there was an actual change in the law. To claim that "Reagan did it legally" and "Obama has not" is a rather disingenuous selective viewing of the facts. (Even aside from the FACT that it is the Supreme Court and not Phattscotty or NIghtstrike that gets to decide if something is constitutional or not)
