Republican Party seems to worship the late former President Ronald Reagan. They all look fondly on those days when he was president in the ’80s. He’s not the perfect hero president you Republicans think he is.
Here are just a few of the bad things he did while president:
1. ‘Reaganomics’
Even today, we are still being screwed by Reagan’s economic reforms.
In the 1980 presidential debate, George H.W. Bush called it “voodoo economics.” The more textbook sounding name is “supply-side economics.
The basic thinking behind it is that the wealthy are the job creators. Reaganomics says that cutting the taxes on the extremely wealthy “job creators” would create more jobs. The theory is that the good fortune of the rich citizens will “trickle-down” to us regular folk.
2. Ignored The AIDS Epidemic
During the 1980s, AIDs was running rampant. People were dying. It started in the early 1980s and rose to 5,596 victims in 1984. He wouldn’t even say the word AIDS publicly until 1985. The government should’ve responded sooner, so more people could’ve lived.
Here is some recently discovered footage of Reagan talking about AIDs as if it were a joke.
3. Mental Health Reforms
Ronald Reagan ruined the mental health care system in this country. It may have led to our huge homeless population.
Reagan signed laws making it more difficult to institutionalize patients who are on medicine. Basically, they kicked patients out of the hospitals and made it harder for them to get back in if they needed help.
There was a major lack of funding to help these people find safe places to stay.
4. More Documented Corruption Than Other Presidents
Republicans in this election are saying that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is corrupt. Well, let’s look at Reagan’s administration. According to Cracked, about 138 officials in his administration were either investigated, indicted, or convicted of various crimes.
James Watt, his Secretary of the Interior, was indicted on 21 felonies. His Attorney General, Edwin Meese, resigned after investigations of corruption. At least nine of Reagan’s staffers were caught committing perjury.
5. He Brought Up The Debt
The GOP wants to blame the Democratic presidents for the debt, but Reagan was the first one to take it over one trillion. He raised our country’s debt up to $3 trillion, which was more than our country had ever owed during the first 80 years of the century.
He was not the perfect president that everyone thinks he was.
Here is Cenk Uygur from the Young Turks talking about this on MSNBC:
Featured image by betancourt via Flickr, available under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
