I agree that Reagan’s vision was not as inclusive as it should have been.
But I think that if that chain is extended to include others, and protect the liberty and dignity of everyone with the same vigor, it’s good.
But this is such an understatement. He didn’t support the Equal Rights Amendment. I say iffy because I think his official position was something along the lines of they’re already protected under this other thing and he appointed a woman.
Minorities, forget about it. No Civil Rights, no Fair Housing, no Voting Rights, working with the literal apartheid and he opposed the MLK holiday. This is in addition to not only letting LGBTAQ be ravaged by a devastating and lethal disease but but hoping, hoping they would die and allowing, pretty much forcing, the USA to sit on its ass while a disease that would go on to kill 35 million in the world was left unchecked, barely studied and certainly any efforts around it left largely unfunded.
This guy wasn’t just not inclusive; that’s too generous. That would imply he cared about some group other than white Christians… and what group(s) would that be? The GOP came to worship a man to the point where they’re claiming today’s GOP wouldn’t be recognized by Reagan… and why exactly is that? Is it because he politely told all the non-white Christians to fuck-off instead of just being blunt about it? He was a charismatic racist and bigot, is that difference?
Reagan appointed the first woman to the supreme Court. And yes, he opposed the equal Rights amendment while president, because he believed that women should be guaranteed equal Rights under the already existing 14th amendment.
He also specifically supported women’s rights groups while he was Governor of California, and helped to get the equal Rights amendment ratified there.
The GOP Platform changed in 1980 to oppose the ERA, but Reagan himself never actually opposed it actively.
But all that aside, I’m not arguing with you that Reagan didn’t support minority groups as much as he should have. His record on civil rights for minorities was bad.
It’s easy to create the illusion of wealth when your policies are directly causing a tripling of the national debt.
Outside of Republican circles/studies, the bottom 20% lost about 5-6% of their average family income throughout the 80s while the top 20% saw double-digit growth to income levels.
And personally I think the economy was due for a rebound, and that combined with the Federal Reserve’s tight money policy Reagan had very good timing in terms of his years in office. Bartlett has vociferously argued against the notion that it was those massive tax cuts that spurred the growth (the Right’s dogmatic fixation on Laffer’s notion that tax breaks pay for themselves), noting that it was barely better than the preceding 8 years in terms of GDP (the best three consecutive years of growth in the nation’s history are 76-78, but inflation and unemployment gave the nation a feeling of economic malaise). And people forget that the nation’s GDP actually fell by almost 2% after Reagan’s policies were implemented, and he’d spend the rest of his years in office signing one tax hike on the middle class after another.
No, this is not supported by the data. And I linked a study which is not a conservative study.
That study mentions income only and completely disregards the costs of deregulation, privatization and the destruction of all safety nets.
It also talks about households, not individuals, and does not address whether there was any relevant difference in composition over the years.
There’s too few data to recommend any policy whatsoever and, from my knowledge of other data (citation needed), it’s misleading at best.
The claim was made that the bottom 20% of the population lost 5% of their income during the 80s.
If data exists to support such a statement, I would be interested to see it, because it does not match any data I have seen.
What do you think about Charlton Heston and members of the NRA as a nominee. They’re the ones that started seriously talking about a literal fight to the death, us vs them, over gun rights; and the divide has grown since. Just a thought, others are great nominees too.
I might be misremembering, but what I’m finding is some nasty drops in the first half of the 1980s for that bottom quintile in terms of median income, with recovery toward the end of the decade. And I just realized the min wage was never touched during the Reagan years. You have Jan of 1981 until Apr of 1990 before it was raised. 1981 alone had 10% inflation, followed by 6%, 3%, 4%, 3.5%, etc.
Donald Trump. Besides the sheer awfulness of his presidency and campaign. He was also one of the major forces behind keeping the birther movement alive and well publicized . Before that he was vocal critic of globalism.
I’m curious as to how you think Nancy Pelosi is/was an actual failure as opposed to just one of the favorite targets of the right. Looking for actual failures and not manufactured outrage of course.
You’re right, she was not a failure.
My choice of picking her was more focused on her hyper partisanship, and contribution to that divide that exists in politics. Her failures are in this regard, in that I feel she contributed to a tone in washington of political combat rather than discourse.
And it’s this partisanship which ultimately threatens to undo what things she accomplished as speaker.
I find it difficult to tell if outrage on the right is actually based in fact or manufactured when it comes to democratic women with power in the public eye lately,especially in Washington. Think Pelosi, Clinton, Warren, Boxer, etc. I expect Kamala Harris to be similarly targeted in the near future.
I would argue that with respect to Pelosi 's reputation, it’s more based upon an unwillingness to put up with the Right’s bullshit, than hyperpartisanship.
Well, I find that in that group, for instance, Clinton is dramatically more competent than the others. Pelosi, as I said, engages in a hyper partisanship which I find detrimental to the overall functioning of washington, which has led us to where we are. When she speaks, she consistently falls back upon generic attacks on “The Republicans”. It’s her go-to thing. And while I am quite happy to criticize them for all kinds of things, I find that the generic attacks on the group itself leads to an animosity which precludes real compromise.
For Warren, while she’s the darling the left, I am personally just not that impressed with her. I think she buys into her own hype way too much.
Boxer, likewise, I don’t have much of an opinion of her.
Like I said, I don’t think it has much to do with them being women though, because I fully respect Clinton’s competency, or someone like Feinstein. I don’t know enough about Kamala Harris to have an opinion on her.
Wasn’t Pelosi instrumental in how the ACA passed because of her cooperation with and concessions to the GOP? Her “partisanship” right now just seems to be a perfectly reasonable response to the abhorrent treatment Hillary Clinton and Obama got and how obstructionist the GOP has been for the last 4 years.
Looking only at income is misleading. The policies of the 80s started the extreme growth of inequality that underpins a lot of today’s political issues:
Income might have raised, but it did not raise proportionally. By 2003 you went from your most equal period in history to inequalities not seen since the great depression, and all that comes with that.
Of course it was better than now, with an income crunch accompanied by similar or worse inequality (which is objectively much worse), but not looking at the inequality growth while just looking at median income loses a big part of the picture about the long term economic damage those policies made.
The economic policies that started in the 80s seem to have been the driving force behind the extreme income inequality, and that extreme income inequality in turn is what years later (once the income is converted to wealth) starts pushing up housing, healthcare and education prices to extreme levels. Not to say that it puts a downwards pressure on productivity, erodes social cohesion and breeds corruption and nepotism (hey, sounds familiar!), at least according to the non-lefty IMF. There’s also an argument that can be explored on how this inequality of economic power might have been what allows an income squeeze on middle and lower class, since they have less ability to resist it, but that’s harder to prove with data, I think.
Which is to say, in the 80s most of America’s middle class saw their income grow, which is good, but also they saw how the American dream, or the ability to “really make it” slipped away forever, inequality raising to a point where social mobility is not really possible on a massive scale as it was in the 1950s-1970s (you will always have exceptions, of course).
[quote=“Timex, post:45, topic:130173, full:true”]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.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/income-growth-and-decline-under-recent-u-s-presidents-and-the-new-challenge-to-restore-broad-economic-prosperity/[/quote]
Ok, I’m splitting this on its own reply, because, after reading the original paper, the data does not, I think, say what the authors of the study say it says. Sorry for the double post, but I don’t want for this to get lost, and I want to know if I’m making a mistake in my analysis:
While the study you quote is (full paper here) interesting, there’s also something to be said about the methodology, or more exactly about the mental wrestling the authors did with the data. So much that is worth expanding upon.
By adjusting by age cohort, what the study proves is that over the span of 10-20 years, a singular cohort sees their income rise as they age. Which makes sense as they are gaining more expertise and rising in the ranks of their chosen careers. And it says very little about real income growth indeed.
Look at the data. It is saying that cohorts aged 25-29 years old in 1975 earned an median of $48,499 in 1975 (when they were aged that) and their income raised over time. What’s the median in 2001 for cohorts aged 25-29 years old in 2001? $53.389, about a 10% increase. Which means starting salaries only rose by 10%. And that’s the only growth in the data for starting salaries, since cohorts aged 25-29 years old in 1982 and 1991 made less than those at that age in 1975.
So, let’s not look at starting salaries and look at the salary caps, or the evolution of the salaries over time. Here we can only properly look at two cohorts, since the 1991 cohort sees their expected cap already into the 2000s, and therefore might not be reflective of the policies enacted in the 80s. The data: cohorts of 1975, 14 years later had an income of $71,463. 25 years in (so, when they are aged 50-59), they are at $78,452. Cohorts of 1981 14 years later had an income of $76.834, again less than a 10% increase, and 25 years later they are at 74,154, which is actually a decrease from the 1975 cohort (but again we arte into the 2000s). The 1991 cohort, for which we can examine the first 14 years, also sees a decrease compared to the 1975 cohort.
Conclusion, the data you provided, divided by age cohorts, does support a pay and income freeze 1980-2000 (1975 2000 to be exact), or al least an increase of less than 10% for the 1981 cohort and a slight decrease for the 1991 cohort. They way it is presented it doesn’t, but I have no clue why it’s presented that way, since it doesn’t say what the authors say it says.
Am I missing something, did I make a mistake reading this? I am not an economist, but that’s what the data itself is telling me.
But to a large extent this doesn’t really matter. What matters is buying power, and from the data available it appears as though that DID increase for all households during the 80’s and 90’s.
It actually says quite a lot about real income growth, as it’s actually tracking the growth of their real income, rather than consistently measuring the bottom. That is, it’s showing what’s ACTUALLY happening to peoples’ incomes.
That’s kind of the point, and why simply looking at the raw median income doesn’t match folks’ perceptions.
Because if you look at the raw median income of say, the bottom 20%, it’s largely flat… But in reality, people in those sections moved up and out of that income level, and were replaced by other folks, who then did the same.
The effect is that for most folks, they were in fact enjoying robust economic growth. Their lives did in fact get better as they aged, and they felt rewarded for their efforts. And this was reflected in opinion polls.
This is contrasted with the period after the turn of the century, where this age based cohorts’ growth flattened dramatically.
The “problem” you are seeing with the analysis is actually the point of the analysis.
Anyway, back to the original question… Koch Brothers. Yeah its not one person, exactly but then again, they are.
Well, I don’t see the point of the analysis then. Nobody ever said people’s salaries did not raise as they grew older. When people were pointing out the lack of income growth during Reaganism and after is to point out the economic outlook of an average American through all his life did not improve in those years (that is, the total amount of money he was to earn during his whole working career). The study completely supports that point. Well it also does say that it got even worse later, but it does not precisely speak of the virtues of the economy in the 80s and 90s.
Because it pales when compared to the 1945-1975 period, when the economic outlook of the average american improved around 80% inflation adjusted.