Don't forget the war on drugs
and we love (/s) what he did to sunny CA slashing property taxes by slashing the public education budget helping lead to a continuing decline in our education system.
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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Don't forget his campaign for governor led to the massive student loan issues we have today. College was just starting to be accessible to everyone that wasn't a white man, and they just couldn't have that!
The homelessness crisis is not about mental health, it is about housing affordability. This also plays into societal biases against the mentally ill.
The current crisis is about affordability. That hasn't traditionally been true.
Yes, however there are many people who are homeless because they are unable to "properly" function in society due to untreated mental illnesses, part of Reagan's budget cuts reduced public health funding, shuttering public mental health facilities. Granted, some had horrendous conditions which has a lasting reputation for "Insane asylums".
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I'm willing to bet that trump beats those numbers
Congress approved the budgets that created all of that debt. Congress was controlled by the democrats the entirety of his time in office. Congress approves of all tax legislation. It's almost as if the democrats aren't any less inclined to support the wealthy.
Congress dropped the top marginal tax rate from 70% to 28% and gained more tax revenue when it was set to 70%. This is because the brackets at that high of a level heavily incentivized rich people to engage in tax evasion or tax avoidance schemes. Removing this high tax rate made the government more money because fewer people cheated on their taxes. This has only worked once and there's no reason to believe further reductions to the top rate would create similar revenue increases.
The missiles sold to Iran were non-functional. The bigger problem was either using the profits from the sale to fund the Contras as we were destabilizing a foreign power for the crime of wanting less capitalism.
What Reagan's real crime was setting Americans against their own government. He was able to push through the destruction of a huge portion of the safety net we had for people under the guise of cleaning up corruption.
This macro is a mess.
So the solution to people committing massive tax fraud is to lower taxes? Not to throw them in jail? 🙄
Tax fraud, tax evasion and tax avoidance are not the same thing.
Cutting the higher marginal tax rates caused more people to move money from less stable economies with looser banking regulations to US banks which resulted in increased tax revenue taken in.
Blah blah blah. Your solution is to let criminals keep ripping us off instead of doing something about it.
As I said last time "Tax fraud, tax evasion and tax avoidance are not the same thing.".
No one proved anyone broke the law so there were no "criminals" to pursue. I was nine when this happened so I didnt make any decisions here.
Reagan's policies expanded wealth inequality, exploded the deficit, and created a narrative that still fuels anti-government rhetoric today.
The policies put forth by the GOP and put into place by the democrat controlled Congress expanded the national debt debt (deficits are annual shortcomings the national debt not deficit is the larger concern).
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He was terrible, and perhaps worse: he was so popular. He got two terms, then his vice president got a term. So popular it seemed to be (to me) that he was the reason we ultimately got stuck with the "Third Way" democrats, which is when the working class was finally completely abandoned.
He really screwed us all
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Let's not forget the treason of letting Oliver North! Besides everything else, North's Contras were drug smugglers who brought in so much cocaine that coke went from being a luxury to a street drug in just a few months.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_epidemic_in_the_United_States
Youtube video https://youtu.be/Mb1GfP5Rwys
In (very) broad strokes, the US basic current modern collapse timeline is like: Nixon --> Regan --> Fairness Doctrine --> Glass-Steagall --> Patriot Act --> bank bailout --> tea party to maga --> current fubar lyfe
goddamn fucking reagan
I was going to post something similar but yeah. Almost every Behind the Bastards episode that touches these topics, there is a straight line from Nixon to Trump.
The TL;DR: Republicans hated how people generally agreed with the facts surrounding Nixon and decided to do something about it. Instead of reporting conservative-slanted opinions, they instead wanted to get rid of facts all together.
Need to squeeze Citizens United in there
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The deinstitutionalization and movement to prison was something that began long before Reagan. Really goes back to the end of ww2 and Kennedy. though reagan definitely accelerated it by a great deal by decreasing budgets substantially and increasing incarceration rates significantly
Reagan was a monster though. What a great day it was when he died
For more information, lookup the impact of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest on mental health services in the United States.
Thanks for that info
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The 13th amendment created the legal groundwork for transforming a free people into a nation of de facto chattel slaves. Reagan accelerated this process massively.
Mental patients 🖐️ (눈‸눈)
"Prisoners with jobs" 👈 (♡ω♡ )
The 13th amendment, which bans slavery, made people less free? We had more slavery before the 13th amendment. What we have now is fewer slaves that most don't think of as slaves but are still slaves we just call it prison work programs.
The 13th amendment banned chattel slavery, but turbocharged penal slavery.
Deregulation in general and of the for profit prison industry in particular has made it so that there's more slaves in the US now than there ever was before the 13th was passed.
Granted, penal slavery is of course nowhere near as bad as chattel slavery was, but it's still slavery, which is morally repugnant barbary and outlawed in every civilized legal system i the world.
Go read it again; the word "except" is doing the heavy lifting here.
"The 13th amendment created the legal groundwork for transforming a free people into a nation of de facto chattel slaves. Reagan accelerated this process massively.
Mental patients 🖐️ (눈‸눈)
“Prisoners with jobs” 👈 (♡ω♡ )"
Where do you see the word "except"? If you intended to write it you did not.
The working context here is larger than what is visible. You will find this to be generally true with human interactions. Best of luck.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
That except. Though their wording about free people seems misguided in the context.