10 Things Conservatives Do Not Want Us to Know About Ronald Reagan
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ThinkProgress Wonk Room Yglesias Progress Report By Alex Seitz-Wald on Feb 5th, 2011 at 12:00 pm RSS 10 Things Conservatives Don’t Want You To Know About View Most Popular Ronald Reagan Most Tweeted Most Emailed Most Commented Last 24 Hours This Week This Month Hatch On Egypt’s Autocratic Leader Hosni Mubarak: ‘I Feel Sad That He’s Going Through This’ Mississippi May Honor Early KKK Leader On Commemorative License Plate Right-Wing Islamophobe Who Doesn’t Believe In Moderate Islam Is ‘Proud’ Of Peter King’s Hearings Citing The Founders, Rand Paul Breaks With His Party And Announces He Will Oppose Extending PATRIOT Act Advertisement Tomorrow will mark the 100th anniversary of President Reagan’s birth, and all week, What We're About conservatives have been trying to outdo each others’ remembrances of the great conservative icon. Senate Republicans spent much of Thursday singing Reagan’s praise What We're Fighting For from the Senate floor, while conservative publications have been running non-stop Social and Economic Healthy Communities commemorations. Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee and former GOP Justice House Speaker Newt Gingrich are hoping to make a few bucks off the Gipper’s centennial. Media Accountability Global and Domestic Security But Reagan was not the man conservatives claim he was. This image of Reagan as a What We're Fighting Against conservative superhero is myth, created to unite the various factions of the right behind a common leader. In reality, Reagan was no conservative ideologue or flawless Public Corruption Incompetent commander-in-chief. Reagan regularly strayed from conservative dogma — he raised Establishment taxes eleven times as president while tripling the deficit — and he often ended up on the wrong side of history, like when he vetoed an Anti-Apartheid bill. Corporate Malfeasance Radical Right-Wing Agenda ThinkProgress has compiled a list of the top 10 things conservatives rarely mention Featured when talking about President Reagan: 1. Reagan was a serial tax raiser. As governor of California, Reagan “signed into law the largest tax increase in the history of any state up till then.” Meanwhile, state spending nearly doubled. As president, Reagan “raised taxes in seven of his eight years in office,” including four times in just two years. As former GOP Senator Alan Simpson, who called Reagan “a dear friend,” told NPR, “Ronald Reagan raised taxes 11 times in his administration — I was there.” “Reagan was never afraid to raise taxes,” said historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited Reagan’s memoir. Reagan the anti-tax zealot is “false mythology,” Brinkley said. Subscribe to the Progress Report 2. Reagan nearly tripled the federal budget deficit. During the Reagan Enter your e-mail address Subscribe years, the debt increased to nearly $3 trillion, “roughly three times as much as the first 80 years of the century had done altogether.” Reagan enacted a major tax cut his first year in office and government revenue Topic Cloud dropped off precipitously. Despite the conservative myth that tax cuts View topics sorted by popularity somehow increase revenue, the government went deeper into debt and Reagan had to raise taxes just a year after he enacted his tax cut. Budget Cantor Chamber Christine Despite ten more tax hikes on everything from gasoline to corporate O'Donnell Civil Rights Congress income, Reagan was never able to get the deficit under control. constitution Corporate Ethics DeMint 3. Unemployment soared after Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts. Unemployment Economy Education Election Ethics jumped to 10.8 percent after Reagan enacted his much-touted tax cut, Filibuster Fox News Gingrich Global and it took years for the rate to get back down to its previous level. Warming GOP GOP Obstruction Meanwhile, income inequality exploded. Despite the myth that Reagan Health Care health reform Immigration presided over an era of unmatched economic boom for all Americans, Joe Miller Judiciary Justice Ken Buck LGBT Reagan disproportionately taxed the poor and middle class, but the economic growth of the 1980′s did little help them. “Since 1980, median Media Minimum Wage National Security household income has risen only 30 percent, adjusted for inflation, while Obama Pledge to America Poverty average incomes at the top have tripled or quadrupled,” the New York Race Radical Right Religion Times’ David Leonhardt noted. Rove Science Senate Social Security http://thinkprogress.org/2011/02/05/reagan-centennial/ Page 1 / 24 Taxes Tea Parties Tea Party Tenthers 4. Reagan grew the size of the federal government tremendously. Women's Rights Reagan promised “to move boldly, decisively, and quickly to control the runaway growth of federal spending,” but federal spending “ballooned” Visit Our Affiliated Sites under Reagan. He bailed out Social Security in 1983 after attempting to privatize it, and set up a progressive taxation system to keep it funded into the future. He promised to cut government agencies like the Department of Energy and Education but ended up adding one of the largest — the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, which today has a budget of nearly $90 billion and close to 300,000 employees. He also hiked defense spending by over $100 billion a year to a level not seen since the height of the Vietnam war. Reports In-depth studies on select topics 5. Reagan did little to fight a woman’s right to choose. As governor of California in 1967, Reagan signed a bill to liberalize the state’s abortion Stimulating Hypocrisy: 114 Lawmakers Block Recovery While Taking Credit For Its Success laws that “resulted in more than a million abortions.” When Reagan ran for president, he advocated a constitutional amendment that would have A TIMELINE OF THE IRAQ WAR prohibited all abortions except when necessary to save the life of the mother, but once in office, he “never seriously pursued” curbing choice. Got a hot tip? 6. Reagan was a “bellicose peacenik.” He wrote in his memoirs that Have a hot news tip? We'd love to hear from you. “[m]y dream…became a world free of nuclear weapons.” “This vision Use the form below to send us the latest. stemmed from the president’s belief that the biblical account of Armageddon prophesied nuclear war — and that apocalypse could be averted if everyone, especially the Soviets, eliminated nuclear weapons,” Name: the Washington Monthly noted. And Reagan’s military buildup was meant Email: to crush the Soviet Union, but “also to put the United States in a stronger Tip: 5 position from which to establish effective arms control” for the the entire (required) world — a vision acted out by Regean’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, when he became president. 6 7. Reagan gave amnesty to 3 million undocumented immigrants. Submit Reagan signed into law a bill that made any immigrant who had entered the country before 1982 eligible for amnesty. The bill was sold as a Archives crackdown, but its tough sanctions on employers who hired undocumented immigrants were removed before final passage. The bill Blog Roll helped 3 million people and millions more family members gain American residency. It has since become a source of major embarrassment for About Think Progress Contact Us Donate conservatives. 8. Reagan illegally funneled weapons to Iran. Reagan and other senior U.S. officials secretly sold arms to officials in Iran, which was subject to a an arms embargo at the time, in exchange for American hostages. Some funds from the illegal arms sales also went to fund anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua — something Congress had already prohibited the administration from doing. When the deals went public, the Iran-Contra Affair, as it came to be know, was an enormous political scandal that forced several senior administration officials to resign. 9. Reagan vetoed a comprehensive anti-Apartheid act. which placed sanctions on South Africa and cut off all American trade with the country. Reagan’s veto was overridden by the Republican-controlled Senate. Reagan responded by saying “I deeply regret that Congress has seen fit to override my veto,” saying that the law “will not solve the serious problems that plague that country.” 10. Reagan helped create the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. Reagan fought a proxy war with the Soviet Union by training, arming, equipping, and funding Islamist mujahidin fighters in Afghanistan. Reagan funneled billions of dollars, along with top-secret intelligence and sophisticated weaponry to these fighters through the Pakistani intelligence service. The Talbian and Osama Bin Laden — a prominent mujahidin commander — emerged from these mujahidin groups Reagan helped create, and U.S. policy towards Pakistan remains strained because of the intelligence services’ close relations to these fighters. In fact, Reagan’s decision to continue the proxy war after the Soviets were willing to retreat played a direct role in Bin Laden’s ascendancy. Conservatives seem to be in such denial about the less flattering aspects of Reagan; it sometimes appears as if they genuinely don’t know the truth of his legacy. Yesterday, when liberal activist Mike Stark challenged hate radio host Rush Limbaugh on why Reagan remains a conservative hero despite raising taxes so many times, Limbaugh flew into a tirade and demanded, “Where did you get this silly notion that Reagan raised taxes?“ UPDATE Salon has more in their series "The Real Reagan," including how he cared http://thinkprogress.org/2011/02/05/reagan-centennial/ Page 2 / 24 more about UFOs than AIDS and how Reagan destroyed respect for the social compact that rebuilt America after World War II. Like 18K Print Tweet l Anonymous Quote from a movie: “When a legend becomes truth, print the legend.” l Anonymous Republicans: deluded or liars? How about deluded liars. And that becomes more obvious when they yell, scream, and bully, like Limbaugh, when confronted with the truth.