I was going to go with the Perlsteinian answer of Goldwater.
I’ve always thought Biden had a bit of Fizban in him …
True. While anti-Muslim sentiment (9-11) led to a social/cultural kind of crazy. While we have been “at war” for 16 years we haven’t come close to building up our military the way we did to fight “state” communism.
I haven’t read that one yet. I have read the other two.
The Middle Class experienced robust income growth throughout Reagan’s entire term, going all the way up through the 90’s. It wasn’t until GWB’s term that this trend reversed.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, households of virtually every type experienced large, steady income gains, whether they were headed by men or women, by blacks, whites or Hispanics, or by people with high school diplomas or college degrees.
This broad income progress stopped around the turn of this century: From 2002 to 2013, the incomes of most households stagnated or declined even as they aged through nine years of expansion and two years of recession. The only types of households with rising incomes over this recent period were those headed by people in their mid-to-late 20s and those headed by college graduates — and their gains were much smaller than those achieved by young and college-educated households in the 1980s and 1990s.
In terms of people responsible for the current state of politics, I think it’s naive to try and pin things to any single person… but I’d suggest folks consider that the current state is most certainly not a creation of the right alone. The same type of hyper partisanship manifests in people like Nancy Pelosi, whose failures as Speaker directly fed into electing the current crew of no nothings that dominate the house.
I would definitely point to some of the major media moguls though, like Rupert Murdock, who weaponized partisanship for the sole purpose of TV ratings.
Income growth is only data point. A lot of people got rich in the 80s. While this was happening, pillars holding up the low-middle/middle-class were being kicked out from under them: union destabilization, deregulation, lots of short term gains for a few at the cost of long term gains for many. Vulture capitalism in the 20th Century got restarted under Reagan, and it hasn’t stopped.
Like!
But it wasn’t “short term gains for a few”. Check the actual data in that report. There was robust economic growth for all sectors of society. Life got better for folks, across the board, throughout the 80’s and 90’s.
It wasn’t until 2000 that we started to see shifts to a lopsided distribution of growth.
Surely changes made through the previous period led to that shift, but when you’re going back two full decades and three administration prior to the decline, it’s a more tenuous link.
Income is important. Watching a disease ravage through a population you decide is not important enough to save makes you a monster.
Yeah. That’s not something to forget, either. Reagan and his cronies basically just ignored the whole Gay Disease thing.
That’s what I’m saying. The foundational government deregulation changes were made in Reagan’s years. And life didn’t get better for all the folks during the 80s. Financial sectors, professional sectors, service sectors, sure. But I have first-hand knowledge (i.e. lived through it – I watched the mining towns I lived in die) of what the 80s, and the beginning of profit-driven globalization, did to manufacturing and resource sectors. It was the beginning of the end for the Rust Belt. The unskilled and semi-skilled middle class got driven straight into the floor.
My Grandfather bought a home, raised a wife and three girls comfortably on a wage paid by Boeing, and he wasn’t a top engineer or anything, just a floor guy. Reagan was the beginning of the end of that.
Again, this is not true, based on the data. Anecdotal examples aside, the data shows that the unskilled and semi skilled middle class ALSO enjoyed robust economic prosperity through the 80’s and the 90’s. Literally every sector of society, regardless of education level, race, income level, etc… they all improved.
There were definitely specific industry sectors which never recovered from the crushing recession that took place in the 70’s, but this lack of recovery was not due to Reagan’s policies. US Manufacturing also saw major modernization, and the workforce grew significantly. A big part of the union weakening you mention occurred as a natural result of these factors, separate from any change in regulatory issues.
Criticizing Reagan for his failure to address the AIDS crisis is totally legitimate. Hell, there are tons of things he could be criticized for. But I think you’re going to far in trying to blame him for economic problems when his administration started a period of economic prosperity that continued through the next TWO administrations.
Not to box you up or anything, but I take it you’re a trickle-down believer?
Then we agree to disagree. The 80’s were not a Golden Age for the workers and middle-class of America.
Gotta agree with this. It was an upswing from the recession probably, but not one that lasted. For most people it was the end of the American Dream, though they didn’t realize it for a while.
Edit: All that said though, I think Reagan’s vision for America is mostly a good one. If people still followed that ideal things would be far from perfect, but they’d be a hell of a lot better than they are. At the end of the day he saw the US as the Good Guys and the protector of freedom against tyranny. Now his party is the official party of tyranny and hates freedom.
The bottom 20% actually got poorer during the 80s. Really, only the top 20-22% gained, and it’s certainly not up for debate that you see a very sudden acceleration in the wealth/income gap. Open hostility toward organized labor. Deregulation. Really, the Reagan years are the bedrock of Republican fiscal lunacy today. Ask Bartlett, I’ve emailed with him and he absolutely detests the Republican party of today. They took all the wrong lessons from the 1980s (such as the Laffer curve).
/pointlesstweet well, can you blame them with a curve named like that?
But look at the data I posted above. Up through 2000, everyone actually DID enjoy economic prosperity. For two whole decades.
That cannot simply be attributed to recovery from the recession in the 1970s. That period of time is simply too long to handwave away.
And really, I lived through exactly that period, and times WERE generally pretty good. And not just for rich folks.
There seems to be a desire to push some of the economic issues that happened after the turn of the century back into the end of they last century, but the data does not support it. It was much more a feature of the new century where we observed a massive shift of all growth going to the ultra rich.
Reagan’s vision of America excluded entire groups of people. He had an iffy position on ERA, he didn’t support Civil Rights and he wanted to push prayer in public schools. Reagan’s vision of America was for white Christians. And if that is the only America someone wants, then I suppose you could call it mostly good. I call it terrible. We’re a diverse country completely capable of getting along with each other and treating each other equally… that’s a good vision for America, and it was not what Reagan pushed.
Reagan’s was the era when Republicans began to learn they could trade accomplishments and bury mistakes with appearances. Today the Republicans are nothing but a party of appearances incapable of doing anything but deconstructing the society and government the appearances of which they’ve spent decades contesting. Decades of misinformation and strawmen lead them to fighting the imaginary demons of demagogues and cynical exploiters, circumscribed by their own rhetoric and gerrymandering, and left hapless without the Punch and Judy spectacle they mistake for politics in a one party government.
This is not factually accurate. Even of you just look at median income, the bottom 20% definitely did not get poorer during the 80s.
But even beyond that, when you do deeper analysis as done at Georgetown, where you adjust for age and thus the economic earnings cycles of people through their lives, you see that people at every economic level saw significant gains through the 80s and 90s.
Also, just so folks know, Robert Shapiro isn’t some sort of crazy right wing loon. He worked for both Clinton and Obama. He’s not some random hack.
Fair enough, I can’t really disagree with any of what you said, hell, I agree with most of it.
Maybe it would be more fair to say the vision he spoke about was a good one. The reality of what he did didn’t live up to those words.