All of these things objectively happened. A conservative might argue that they weren't all Reagan's fault/responsibility, but that's bullshit.
Just before he was elected, his campaign conspired to prevent the release of US hostages, a move they made to make Carter look bad. This is one of the reasons he won. The man worked directly against the benefit of US citizens for personal gain.
It's a shame that Carter gets the blame for failing to reach an agreement to release the hostages, instead of Regan getting pinned for the much worse behavior of deliberately delaying their release.
Thanks for your comment but in this community we always like to see sources.
Could you provide some citations to back up your claim?
Someone else here already linked a wiki article that summarizes it. As far as I know, the most recent source is a retelling of events from Ben Barnes: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/us/politics/jimmy-carter-october-surprise-iran-hostages.html.
That sounds shockingly similar to some current happenings…
Where did you learn that?
This is one report about it. It's fair to ask for sources of course but also literally all I had to do was do one web search.
There was once a union employee. When Reagan fired the air traffic controllers for striking “illegally” the big companies did hardcore union busting. This employee, young and with a family, was suddenly thrusted into a world with wages racing to the bottom. People being fired for any or no reason. Strike? Say hi to your scabs.
I know this is vague, but it’s real. Edited for privacy, but real nonetheless. Fuck Ronald Reagan.
Edit:
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/788002965 Some context for my anecdote. Sorry :(
Ronald Reagan is such a scab himself, he once led strikes as the head of the SAG, then look what he did to Unions.
US workers are too tribal, each industry thinks they're different than others.
See what happened with the nordic unions, uniting against Tesla across different industries? This is what the American unions should have done to the US government after Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. Automotive, public servants, train drivers, every union should have walked out until the controllers were reinstated. Instead they looked on as if it didn't apply to them.
Thanks for your comment but in this community we always like to see sources.
Could you provide some citations to specific claims made in the OP?
Hey sorry about that, I’m new here and I appreciate the chance to fix.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/788002965
This is from Planet Money of NPR which really sums up the entire event way better than I could. If necessary I’ll try to dig up an even better source. My original comment is admittedly anecdotal.
I think I just had a stroke trying to read that
I’m sorry it reads the way it does. Part of my reason for joining Lemmy was to go back to the old way of the internet where you are only a screen name with no real ties to identity. The uncensored version of my story would be too easy to dox unfortunately.
I’ll work on my writing :(
I did not see repealing the fairness doctrine mentioned.
This is what is basically allowing media like fox "news" to spout straight up lies and made up news, while selectively not mentioning, twisting or brushing over actual news.
It's also what allowed Sinclair to start their buying spree and create a hidden broadcast network of similar right-wing propaganda and lies. John Oliver had a very good episode on them: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc
For me this is the biggest sin of Ronald Reagan. Without this change to content quality control, there wouldn't be so many Americans who live in an alternate reality, which is also what is allowing the republican party to not even try to govern & is allowing them to be as despicable as they are. Those rightwing "news" channels will after all just brush over their gaffes & instead conjure some made up scandal again over something democrats or one of the designated out groups has allegedly done.
I believe the fairness doctrine only applied to print media so unfortunately we'd still have the same clusterfuck as far as television goes.The above argument was wrong, but posted so frequently when this issue comes up I mistook it for the Truth™©® :P
Not to defend this ghoul or anything lol I wish there was a hell so he could be rotting in it.
Fox News is cable. And was never subject to the fairness doctrine. It may have had a small impact on AM radio. But nothing near the impact of all the consolidation that happened under Reagan and Clinton.
Fox news was launched when the fairness doctrine was already dead for many years and Rush Limbaugh was huge. Without the repeal of the fairness doctrine, right wing talk radio shows wouldn't have been so ubiquitous. Without similar alternate fact content from many sources, fox news alternate facts would have to be closer to reality out of necessity or they would have no credibility with their target audience.
It's one of those things where one thing lead to another. Without the repeal of the fairness doctrine, fox news as we know it today, would simply not exist. Here's a good article on it: https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2021/how-rush-limbaughs-rise-after-the-gutting-of-the-fairness-doctrine-led-to-todays-highly-partisan-media/
I don't get your comment about how the impact on am radio was "small". Consensus seems to be that the repeal in 1987 was the start of the shift to the alternate facts radio shows on am radio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_talk_radio
Most consolidation came later and it's definitely a contributing factor, but this shift was already well under way before most of the consolidation happened.
He also further spread anti-government sentiment which has made society far worse as people question everything about government and how it can help people.
Are you aware that the worst atrocities committed by any group of humans have been committed by governments?
It’s good to question government. Governments’ relationship to their subjects is one of domination. That can go bad very quickly because it’s nothing like a relationship between equals.
You left out Oliver North helping the Contras smuggle tons and tons of cocaine into America, creating the Crack Epidemic of the 1980's.
Thanks for your comment but in this community we always like to see sources.
Could you provide some citations to support those claims?
Which came thru Arkansas while Clinton was governor. Not defending Ollie since he is human garbage.
Technically Reagan started closing mental institutions while he was governor of California. He promised to open up alternatives and never did. It was a popular action that started when "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" showed abuse in the mental health system and the new system was suppose to have fixed those issues.
This is the problem, is that mental health abuses still happen today in whats left of mental health system in america.
We don't need to tear it down, we need a federal oversight authority with balls and power to revoke licenses, issue massive fines, etc etc, with the funding and manpower to randomly inspect these facilities and interview patients at the drop of a hat, at any time of year, possibly multiple times a year.
and we need massive incentives to get hordes of new people, doctors, nurses, therapists, etc, into education to become qualified in their respective fields to do these jobs, and the fair pay for them.
My point was only that Reagan didn't destroy the mental health systems while he was president. If you try bringing that up to a supporter, they will try and gotcha you on it. The other stuff was just to give some context as to why he was able to get away with it. Republicans never let a tragedy go to waste.
California was the first state to start dismantling their mental health systems and other states followed their lead, so most of the blame is still on him.
I think any institution where an individual has power over others is going to have some twisted, bad apples in there. Everyone I know knows someone who had a teacher in school go out their way to harm a child.. Always for no other reason than personal gratification and bitterness. I absolutely believe there were and still are Nurse Ratcheds out there.
Being out on the street is undoubtedly bad but you should not be clamoring to return to the days of stuffing homeless people into mental institutions. Indefinite involuntary commitment without trial or appeal is barbaric and that's setting aside the kind of "treatments" they used and what they considered "disorders".
Please, just give them homes.
I'm with you that the state should provide housing for them.
But schizophrenia is a serious disease and is prevalent (20%) in this group. Those people need psychiatric help. Only a home won't fix it.
I do not think an elevated incidence of a specific mental illness among a population makes it justifiable to legalize throwing them all into indefinite psychiatric detention without oversight or trial. I’m all for having facilities where schizophrenic people can get care they need in a safe environment. I’m not for using those institutions as homeless storage facilities because people can’t separate homelessness from mental illness in their head. You can and should address both separately.
B-But why would we waste taxpayer money into improving the welfare of the people?
There's a middle ground, isn't there? Like there are people out there that won't get better without forced intervention. It's not electroshock or nothing, we have more knowledge about proper humane treatment now.
The middle ground is give them homes and counseling. Not give people an easy way to shove the problem out of sight while creating another private prison industry.
Not all homeless are mentally ill. Asylums are not a place for people without homes. The notion that every person living on the street has something wrong with them that will fix their homelessness if you treat it is absurd, dangerous, and insulting.
we have more knowledge about proper humane treatment now.
They thought what they were doing at the time was proper and humane, too. Homosexuality was classified as a mental illness until 1973. Conversion therapy is still a thing. How many modern-day therapists do you think would try to "treat" a homeless trans person who winds up in their asylum?
Give everyone homes and you prevent a lot more problems as well.
Right to housing would help so many people better their lives by leaving bad situations they are only in because they don't have any where else.
We would all benefit by not having to suffer just to have a safe place to sleep. We wouldnt have to enslave ourselves to other people or employers and could make better choices for our lives(even though people will still make bad choices)
Sorry, but this is idealistic hogwash. Giving people homes does not solve debilitating mental illnesses like schizophrenia, nor does it solve drug addiction.
Housing should be universal, but rehabilitation of some sort is needed for a large plurality of homeless people and just throwing them into an apartment does not heal social ills.
Throwing homeless people into asylums doesn't solve homelessness unless you intend to keep them there forever. Mental illness is over represented in homeless populations but correlation is not causation. Homelessness is not a mental illness.
Using due process to put people (housed or not) with serious mental illnesses into a dedicated care facility is fine. Suggesting that all homeless belong in there as a matter of policy is just an excuse to sweep them out of sight without solving any underlying issues by just assuming that the underlying issues are all mental illness.
This is not to mention how the war on drugs lead to massive effects on vital industries such as hemp
Big Oil had a big part in banning hemp. Hemp rope was used in boat docking and nylon rope ended up replacing it.
That reminds me I wanted to look up if the non drug use parts of marijuana plants can be processed into fabric too or if it's any different. Like 20 years ago when google still worked. I forgot though. Also if marijuana seeds are the same food wise as hemp seeds. probably not worth the price though
Although the two plants are of the same species, hemp plants grown for fiber used to make rope are different from marijuana plants grown for flowers that produce THC (the "drug part") in many physiological and practical ways. As different as a wolf from a shih tzu, or a crabapple from a honeycrisp.
For the most part, THC is produced in the flower of the cannabis plant. Most cannabis plants are either male or female (not both), and only female plants produce flowers.
Since hemp plants are cultivated for fiber, they usually have thick, strong, stalks. It's better to grow them taller as opposed to wider, to fit more plants in a field. Both male and female plants can be used for fiber. Female hemp plants do grow small flowers, and those flowers do produce small amounts of THC, but not enough to be worth harvesting. Legally, modern hemp plants grown for fiber have less than one third of one percent THC content.
Since marijuana plants are cultivated for flowers, they usually have multiple, branching stalks, and they often spread and grow bushy at the top. It's better to grow them wider as opposed to taller, so each plant can spread out and produce multiple flower stalks. The thin, branching stalks of these relatively short female marijuana plants could be used for fiber, but there's probably not enough material there to be worth the effort. Meanwhile, many producers claim their marijuana flower to have 25% THC content or more.
It's thought that cannabis flowers produce THC for at least two reasons. One is that the compound is sticky and helps hold on to pollen that might drift past from nearby male plants. Another reason is that it acts as a sunscreen for the flowers. The flowers produce THC to capture pollen, and also to protect themselves from the sun when they are wide open and waiting for the pollen to come.
Cannabis seeds don't contain any THC (except whatever small amount may be left over from the flowers that produced them). All else being equal, the seeds of a hemp plant and the seeds of a marijuana plant should have the same value as a food source or industrial resource. Seeds from marijuana plants are rarer, though not necessarily more valuable.
One reason marijuana seeds are rare is that cannabis flowers produce way more THC when they are left unfertilized. The plant is producing THC in order to attract pollen, so as long as there is no pollen around, the plant just keeps producing more THC. It is by far most efficient to keep THC-producing female plants isolated from male plants. But this means those flowers are never fertilized and never produce any new seeds.
Long ago, it was common for marijuana bud to have seeds. Cannabis flowers grown outdoors are much more difficult to keep from being fertilized. Seedless marijuana bud, "sinsemilla," was an uncommon treat for many illicit cannabis consumers in the '70s, '80s, or even into the '90s. More recently, relaxed legal regulation and technological advances have made controlled indoor marijuana growing much easier and more effective, and much more common. These days the paradigm has flipped, and it's highly unusual (and maybe a little insulting) to find seeds in any flower purchased for THC consumption.
Thanks for your comment but in this community we always like to see sources.
Could you provide some citations to back up your claim?
Deregulation of rails also had massive effects down the line. There was a lot of consolidation that just made everything significantly more expensive and caused us to be more dependent on oil thanks to the massive rise in the trucking industry
Thanks for your comment but in this community we always like to see sources.
Could you provide some citations to support your claim?
The deregulation was kind of inevitable. It was a bad time for railroads before it and it was a slightly less bad time for railroads after it.
I strongly suspect that in the long run the solution will be to nationalize the rails and signaling then license private companies to run on them
It’s no wonder the top 1% own such a large percent of the wealth when they are being taxed so little. Why give your employees a raise when you can take in a massive bonus with very little tax liability instead?
You’ve got cause and effect backwards. They are the 1% because they own such a large percent of the wealth.
Low taxes just help to maintain and widen the gap.
The gap is the problem. There will always be a 1%. That’s basic statistics. The problem is how far away that 1% is from the median.
Taxing accrued wealth, and closing loopholes for using wealth to leverage loans and avoiding income tax, increasing taxes for the highest income earners, reducing tax for everyone for lower brackets, taxing housing sales heavily when not your primary residence, same for running costs so as to not make rentals too lucrative.
Do all of these, and you'll have a lot more budget to also fix a lot of the other inequality issues... Not that anything of this really matters in the long run, since will capitalism will happily gouge natural resources until it's not profitable to do so. So, do all of the above, and also offset the destruction of natural resources with regulations and further taxation.
Ps: The word tax has been mentioned 6 times, which will likely upset some people. However, this would arguably be good for most Americans. And just... Less good for the obscenely rich. Everyone should want that trade. Even the very rich should want that... except for the sociopathic ones, they don't have the ability to understand why that would be a net good change.
But I bet he made a lot of money while doing that.
The only comment that even attempts to debunk anything while offering sources is buried by downvotes. This community is badly in need of moderation.
You're not wrong, but as it's literally been six months since anyone posted anything here I've decided to let the discussion continue as long as the topic stays on Regan's presidency.
What comment is that? Not seeing it.
I scrolled through every comment looking because I thought you had seen one. Did I miss it?
Because they're not entirely accurate. And the ratio of downvotes to upvotes should've sparked skepticism. The replies point out why it's not completely accurate.
Over-moderation is exactly why we're here. I'm not so quick to ask for people to do my fact-checking for me. You probably shouldn't be, either. I don't want a mod making that decision.
A number of people replied about Reagan's work ending state mental institutions, and made a lot of good points. One interesting aspect of that was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation. In the 60s and 70s, mental health professionals were advocating for moving from a institution-based model of care (a la "One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest") to a community-based model (groups like https://www.reachinc.org/ basically follow this model). The basic thrust: ensuring that individuals are a part of a community, and care is tailored to the individual. It's very well-meaning at its core. By the lat 70s, deinstitutionalization had (to some extent) become doctrine with experts working with disabled individuals. And for good reason! A number of early studies showed promising results! So come the 80s and Reagan. Reagan has an easy excuse for closing down institutions: experts in th field even recommend it! There's one really important caveat, though: experts recommended diverting the funding the institutions had received into community-based support (again, see the link above for Reach as an example of how they imagined this funding being dispersed). Reagan...just cut the funding. So really, he did a "No Child Left Behind" 20 years earlier! Which, as I type it out...is even shittier. He gave false hope that he was actually going to do something great for mentally disabled people, and instead threw them on the street. Man. Reagan really sucked.
Side note: there are groups like Reach all over the US and the world, and they all could use help. Volunteers, funding, etc. A quick bit of research and you may meet some incredible people in your local community.
“Reagan”, not “Regan”
Thanks. Updated.
Don’t forget record setting interest rates.
I bought a house in the summer of 1988. My interest rate was 10.9% APR. Nobody batted an eye about it either...
Thanks for your comment but in this community we always like to see sources.
Could you provide some citations to back up that claim?
Why is this an image of text? Makes it a lot harder to reply to, and you specifically asked for a reply.
Tripling the Debt
Usually, when someone accuses a POTUS of significantly impacting the national debt, they are lying, as Congress controls the country's wealth. This is no exception. For example, Reagan's repeal of the Windfall Profit Tax on Oil is usually used as part of the claim, but what he signed passed both the House and the Senate with veto-proof majorities; claiming he had anything significant to do with their passing is deeply disingenuous.
Dropped the income tax rate
Not going to bother with a link this time; it should be fundamental, basic common knowledge that a POTUS has no power over income tax rates. That's as Congressional as it gets. See statement above for a linked example of how Congress controls taxes.
Sold 500 missiles to Iran
This is an easy one; it was significantly more than 500.
Let 90k Americans die of AIDS
I have no idea what this is even about. Do you mean the Watkins Commission?
Claim about Reagan's impact on mental institutions and its impact on homelessness
The first half sounds truthy, and certainly vague enough to be impossible to "debunk", with the major caveat that, as with taxes, it's a near-certainty that Congress did the lion's share of this. The real meat on these bones is your claim that eroding the institutions led to a homelessness crisis (and tour subclaim that the crisis is still happening). I don't have time to debunk that, gotta get to work, but I wanted to acknowledge my failure to do so. It might be super true or super false, and either way I'm genuinely curious.
Congress did the lion’s share of this
It's almost like that's the way it typically works. The President sets the agenda, and has a reasonable amount of control on what gets presented to Congress.
The president is literally the de facto leader of his party. Anything and everything the party does, he is responsible for on paper.
You do realize Congress passes bills for the president to sign, the president negotiates with congress to get bills pass FOR the president to sign into law, so yes congress passes parts for the president to sign SO that congress and the president can get what they want.
10 monkeys in a room trying to order pizza is hard to do when you don't have a zoo keeper to tell them what there getting.
I think the way you attempt to keep Congress and the Executive separate skirts the actual way politics work even if the governmental mechanisms supports your point. In other words, there's a reason why it's called Reganonics and the Regan tax cuts. In a world without parties, I would agree with you.
Second, you don't address budget deficient and the role in the national debit. Budgets are created by the executive and then approved by the legislature. You can see that between 1981 and 1989, the budgetary deficit was greatest during Republican rule.
And relative to economic output (GDP), it was the worst between 81 and 86.
All of this is to say that the president matters in effecting the debt.
PS. Your link isn't to the Windfall Profit Tax on Oil but to Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act. I don't think they are the same thing, but correct me if I'm mistaken.
Presidential veto.
Any sources that he used it? If not. He's on the hook.
Thank you for your objective take on OP's claim, and for providing sources as well 👏
What do you want people to say, that Reagan wasn't objectively horrible? The only thing wrong with this image is that it's abridged. You could pen volumes with the terrible shit that stems from Reagan.
Yep. Like pioneering gun control in California. it was all started to opress minorities when the Black Panthers began to arm themselves to protect the people from corrupt LAPD cops.
He also started the path to end the fairness doctrine, which directly leads to rush limbaugh, which leads to fox "news" which leads to the tea party which leads to sarah palin as a major ticket vice presidential candidate which leads to a trump presidency which leads to how fucked we are today and in the future.
Given that homelessness rates almost directly correlate with cost of living, and not whether or not mental institutions exist, that's the wrong reason to blame Reagan for a rise in homelessness. All of the union busting under his presidency is a much better reason
What about all the homeless that are too mentally ill to even sign up for welfare? Not that welfare even comes close to cost of living. There are quite a few of them.
He also oversaw a doubling of the prison population during his presidency. That's not entirely (and maybe not even mostly) his fault - Congress and plenty of states were all about being "tough on crime," but he was definitely on board with it. That probably also contributed to homelessness. People are significantly more likely than the general population to be homeless post-incarceration, and anyone who's done time can tell you that it makes a lot harder to get a good job.
Well when you just dump people out of their (admittedly terrible) psyche housing into nothing, the homeless population increases quickly.
Well, Ivestopedia says the national debt increased about 160% not 300%. Still the 3rd worst in presidential history. Brookings.edu says the top tax rate went from 70% to 50%.
Too lazy to look up any more.
Almost all mental health institutions were either run by the state or country and relied on very little federal funding. Their popularity collapsed after the 1975 movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest that depicted such institutions in negative light. Reagan may be to blame for the other items but not this.
They were called State Houses for a reason. However, they did rely on no small amount of federal funding, even indirectly. Carter started a bill (MHSA1980) that was supposed to help mental health institutions like these, Regan killed it, and the promise was that the states would rework how these mentally ill were handled. Nobody ever got around to it. Taxes = evil, and there was also a study that was pushed hard by anti-tax types to “mainstream” mental patients. More cost cutting by closing State institutions and booting the patients into the public and like I said, the help never materialized. That’s the quick and dirty version.
The movie had nothing to do with it.
You are only partially correct about Reagan. He isn’t entirely responsible, but he absolutely had a hand in it. Cutting a bunch of the MHSA and the failure was also the State’s unwillingness to maintain public Institutions, but that ties in with the deregulation during the early ‘80s (Reagan’s doing) as well as fixing Medicare prices to hospitals so that hospitals had to look elsewhere to make money, and that means you and I paid more.
So yeah, loss of mental health care facilities and health care costs in general are directly tied to the Reagan administration’s actions in the early 1980s.
Thank you for the clarification
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with JFK's movement for deinstutionalization? If there was a serious cut in federal funding, it happened then. Reagan didn't bring it back, but it was already mostly gone by his time. A good book to read is "American Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System" by E. Fuller Torrey. Many historians who discuss the decline in public mental health in the US specifically site the book (and later the movie) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as a principle cause for the shift in dollars. And really, the institutions were bad. Very bad. The attempt to replace them with something else ended-up being replaced with ... nothing else except crime, homelessness, and police.
Thanks for your comment but in this community we always like to see sources.
Could you provide some citations to back up your claims?
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with JFK's movement for deinstutionalization? If there was a serious cut in federal funding, it happened then. Reagan didn't bring it back, but it was already mostly gone by his time. A good book to read is "American Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System" by E. Fuller Torrey. Many historians who discuss the decline in public mental health in the US specifically site the book (and later the movie) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as a principle cause for the shift in dollars. And really, the institutions were bad. Very bad. The attempt to replace them with something else ended-up being replaced with ... nothing else except crime, homelessness, and police.
interesting community called c/debunkthis
look inside
1 post in the last 7 months, 1.3k points
no one debunking
more like c/circlejerk lol
90,000 seems low.
I think what everyone should recognize is that every president is going to have a list like this because they are all terrible presidents, in modern history.
His not also destroy the public heathcare too?
He’s also a big reason why food prices are so high since he was president:
Which had the knock on effect of growing sugar in the Everglades which has contributed to much of the damage to them.
You should be aware guys this is a pro trump thread. Negative Trump relayed comments have been removed (including mine) without reasons given. might be worth blocking this OP in the spirit of Lemmy.
Your comments were removed simply because they were off-topic or broke the civility rules, as did many others.
Apologies for not leaving a specific reason in each case, but there were a lot of comments that had to be removed and I've had a busy day.
I was unaware we were deleting comments arbitrarily defined as off topic on lemmy. This has toxic Reddit vibes.
