He signed in the Omnibus Reconciliation Act on the heels of killing Carter’s Mental Health Systems Act.
Basically killed a chunk of fed assistance for heath care, punted it to the states with a nebulous “we’ll figure it out” which they promptly didn’t. So state mental housing disappeared and now you have mentally ill homeless everywhere.
And on top of everything else, throwing money at rich people, tax cuts for rich people, trickle down, throwing money at the military, and we haven’t even gotten to Gingrich’s bullshit “contract with America” that helped the Regan years push us towards the evangelical and fringe right we have to deal with today.
Reagan cut taxes while increasing spending, despite talking like his goal was to reduce government excess. As a result, the national debt increase for the first time since WWII and has not stopped in that trend since then.
He and Thatcher were instrumental in bringing neoliberalism into mainstream politics. Neoliberalism differs from classical liberalism in that its about freeing capital and not people. This directly led to all the problems we face today with a government that used to be by and for the people but now the only people the government serves are the corporations we gave out rights to.
Sabotaged Iran hostages being released during Carter’s administration. And the stuff others said. Check Hell of Presidents on the Chapo Traphouse patreon feed. I found it super interesting (I’m a history nerd).
I think Iran (let’s leave the contra side out) was pretty bad. The US had been helping Sadam Hussein fight Iran by selling them weapons for years, only to discover they also started selling them to Iran too. Talk about hateful… Supplying weapons to both sides so they can go kill each other.
It’s why Sadam was so distrustful of the US, especially when Shrub (Bush Jr) came knocking a couple decades later.
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