Reagan's Legacy

Okay, it's been almost a week since Ronald Reagan's funeral, so now, here it is - a list of examples of how his administration wreaked so much havoc on the United States. This list is hardly comprehensive, but it'll give you a good idea of how Reagan left us worse off than when he took over. Consider this:

Budget cuts for domestic programs. In the name of saving money, Reagan cut funding for everything from education aid to school lunch programs. Indeed, to save money on the latter, his administration declared ketchup a vegetable. Many poor and lower-middle-class people suffered from these budget cuts, and a lot of them wound up living on the streets. The money saved went to benefit . . .

Tax cuts for the rich. The wealthiest one percent of Americans were the prime beneficiaries of Reagan's tax policy, getting the lion's share of most of the cuts. The idea, as the appropriately surnamed conservative economist Arthur Laffer explained it, was that if the wealthy got huge tax cuts, they'd invest more of their money in their companies and produce more jobs. Actually, many rich people invested in huge mansions and limousines, which created jobs for butlers and chauffeurs but hardly helped unemployed steelworkers.

The arms race. Reagan unnecessarily built up a huge military, with a huge military spending plan, to spend the Soviet Union into oblivion. This not only busted the federal budget and created huge deficits that would nearly bankrupt the United States as it did post-Soviet Russia, it created a lot of nuclear waste from the production of so many atomic warheads.

Latin America. Reagan professed to believe that the United States was a beacon for freedom throughout the world, yet his Latin America policy helped propped up military dictatorships in Guatemala and Honduras, along with an elected but death-squad-backed right-wing government in El Salvador (where the government murdered American nuns and lied about it later). Reagan also backed an insurgency against the Marxist-Leninist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, which would have been fine if the contras, as they were called, were decent people. Actually, they were murderers, thugs, and mercenaries who terrorized the Nicaraguan countryside with their attacks on farms and villages.

And that was just in Central America. He also pursued warmer relations with Chile's Augusto Pinochet, the slayer of Santiago, as well as with the fascist junta in Argentina - until the Argentines invaded the Falkland Islands, a British colony off the Argentine coast, in April 1982.

Iran-Contra. The Iran-contra affair started as an attempt to open a dialogue with Iranian leaders who might succeed the Ayatollah Khomeini by selling arms to Iran for the freedom of hostages in Lebanon. Not only did Reagan sell out to terrorists (most of the "moderates" who took over when Khomeini died in 1989 were no less extreme than Khomeini himself), rogue members of his administration violated an act of Congress by funding the Nicaraguan rebels without congressional sanction. Oliver North is the main villain here, but so are John Poindexter, Richard Secord, and the late CIA director William Casey. Not to mention Elliot Abrams, the hatchet-faced State Department official whom one Democratic congressman called " a lying son of a bitch" who took more pride in his own ignorance than anyone the congressman ever met.

South Africa. Reagan crowed about human rights during his eight years as president, but he paid scant attention to the plight of blacks in South Africa, then ruled by a white minority government that forced the black majority to live in poverty, with basic citizenship rights, even as they were exploited to produce much of South Africa's wealth. Small wonder that Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu called Reagan "the pits."

The environment. Reagan spent eight years allowing more logging, mining, and oil exploration at the expense of clean air and clean water. His attitude was such that he (like his partners in crime Anne Gorsuch Burford and James Watt) didn't give a damn about what kind of a country he was going to leave future generations. But then Reagan was no environmental scientist, as he confused nitrogen oxide, a pollutant that comes from cars, with nitrous oxide, a more plentiful but harmless gas emitted by trees, and thus concluded that trees caused more pollution than cars.

"No one uses mass transit." Speaking of transportation, this is the reason Reagan gave for wanting to cut funding to mass transit - including Amtrak, the national intercity passenger rail service.

The sleaze factor. Some of the individuals Reagan brought into government who ended up leaving in scandal included Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan, Attorney General Edwin Meese, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Samuel Pierce, national security advisor Richard Allen, national security adviser Robert McFarlane, the aforementioned national security advisor John Poindexter, and the also aforementioned Watt, Burford, and North. :-(

Saddam Hussein. The Reagan administration supported Iraq in its war with Iran to destabilize Khomeini's Islamic fundamentalist regime. We gave the Iraqis lots and lots of military aid, which is how we knew Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We sold them to him! In true Orwellian fashion, the current administration wants us to forget Saddam Hussein was ever an ally of ours.

The Bush dynasty. If Reagan hadn't chosen George Bush as his running mate, Bush would never have been elected President in 1988, his son never would have gotten into politics, never mind becoming President himself, and we wouldn't have to worry about this shadowy, avaricious family producing a future President - Jeb, for example.

There are many more reasons why Reagan was bad for America, and you can find them right here. But maybe we shouldn't be knocking Reagan's memory and questioning his leadership so much as we should examine the kind of country would choose him as their leader in the first place. As author Paul Fussell, one of America's greatest intellectuals, put it, how could one imagine "a country that declares its values and worth by electing as its President, then re-electing, a superannuated movie star so ignorant of modern and contemporary history as to constitute a long-running comedy among the intelligent, a person so inattentive to world reality as to assert in the late 1980s that very few living Germans even remember the Second World War? Whose body of ideas embraced primarily the notion that school prayer and abolition of taxes on the rich are what the country needs, together with the conviction that indigence and homelessness are voluntary?" 

What about such a country, indeed?