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There has been 6 presidents since Reagan, how is our current economy his fault?
Because actions can have long term consequences, and fixing those consequences can take a long time. Especially when people invested in the status quo hold a lot of power.
He's not solely responsible, but he was a gatekeeper of a lot of shit that was let loose during his tenure.
I mean there is like 100 other things I can think of that are more responsible for todays economy than a president from 40 years ago. That would be like Reagan blaming Hitler for an economic slump.
Reagan was massive in solidifying the stagnation of employee wages we have today. It started to gain traction in the late 70s and Reagan just added fuel to that fire with his economic policies. Trickle down economics doesn't work, it never has, it always was a bullshit phrase made to sound good because economics is complicated but the average person knows how the hell water flows. The rich don't spend their money, they invest it and hoard it, always have. Businesses don't increase employee wages, they buyback stocks and pay shareholders dividends while reducing employee wages.
Combined with focusing law enforcement on the bullshit war on drugs which has led to the militarization of the US police force while ignoring underlying causes of crime entirely to instead focusing on punishment, It does nothing to actually prevent crime and solve issues and instead just exacerbates the issue while they arbitrarily deem certain drugs better than others, ignoring their own definitions because there is no actual check on it. Drug scheduling exists, but the DEA gets to decide where things get placed. They're never going to move things around to reduce their funding as new research comes to light. Marijuana is a glaring current example. It was made illegal because of course, hippies, and it threatened both the paper (hemp) and cigarette industries... and to this day is still listed as a Schedule I drug... meaning:
Schedule I: Drugs with no current medical use with high potential for abuse and/or addiction. Schedule II: Drugs with some medically acceptable uses, but with high potential for abuse and/or addiction. These drugs can be obtained through prescription.
We know that is complete bullshit due to thousands of medical studies showing legitimate use, yet it is still classified as having no medical use.
On that same track, why is crack cocaine a Schedule I drug while powder cocaine is Schedule II? They're basically the same drug. Couldn't possibly be due to certain types of folks (Blacks) generally using one type (crack) over the other. Drug scheduling couldn't possibly be used to try and hide law enforcement racial discrimination in a veil of illegality. Why is Peyote listed as a schedule I drug? Couldn't possibly be so they have a reason to arrest some Native Americans for their native customs. America would NEVER do anything terrible to the Native Americans without a good reason.
And then there's always his FCC abolishing the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, introduced in 1949, it required the holders of broadcast licenses both to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that fairly reflected differing viewpoints. That couldn't possibly be related at all to the massive increase in dramatically party polarized and biased news and editorial programs and the widespread increase in misinformation from "news" companies in the 40 years since.
Reagan isn't solely responsible, but he helped lay the ground work for A LOT of bullshit we're still dealing with today.
why is crack cocaine a Schedule I drug while powder cocaine is Schedule II? They're basically the same drug
What medical use is there for freebase cocaine?
Good question. Ask the DEA since they determined that apparently there is a medicinal use that separates the two.
Well, for freebase cocaine they determined that there isn't one, given that it's schedule 1. That's why I was asking what medical use you think it does have that would warrant it being schedule 2 like cocaine hydrochloride.
As far as I know, the freebase form legitimately doesn't have the medical uses that the salt form does, due to the poor solubility, so the difference in scheduling with cocaine is a poor example of the DEA's shittyness. Better to stick with good examples like their mis-scheduling of cannabis
As a topical anesthetic for dental work, or so I've read.
That's the medical use of cocaine hydrochloride, aka powder cocaine. The freebase has poor water solubility, and thus presumably wouldn't be very useful as a topical anesthetic
The precedence for not having adequate taxes for high wealth has been devastating for our busineesses. You use to have to be good to make money back then as opposed to simply having large amounts of money allowing to easily grow it. Earning an additional dollar in investment was harder and harder the more your company made which forced it to run efficently or several smaller ones could eat your lunch.
Can you elaborate or reference books or economic terms on this? Genuinely interested, never heard this before.
Honestly the biggest difference with the 90% marginal rate is that the reputation of your company used to be more valuable than cash.
Back then to avoid the top bracket, you'd reinvest into your company and make sure it paid you and your family out for the next hundred years.
Now you don't have to deal with all that. Just sell out or cash out asap, and you don't really need to deal with making sure the company is well run or maintains a reputation.
In fact, a reputation since the 1980s has increasingly just been an untapped source of cash. Buy the company, cut every corner, and it'll take years for the reputation to catch up to how shit the product has become.
This has been the biggest driver of enshittification over the past fifty years.
The current added push to enshittification is venture capital drying up. Consider Uber, a company whose entire business model was to skim money off of drivers who provided all of their own equipment. Once you've scaled enough to dwarf the relatively fixed cost of building the app, nearly everything they bring in should be pure profit. But they ran at a huge loss every year. Why? Because the way to make money in the 2010s wasn't to build a better mousetrap and sell it for profit. The way to make money in the 2010s was to attract venture capital and cash out. The more you could spend, the more attractive you'd look to hedge funds and investors.
Now with relatively easy 6% investments lying around left and right, the desperate search for investment dumps is gone. All these places that were structured for big numbers to get a higher valuation suddenly need to just be profitable off their mousetraps.
Does that make sense?
And if he has any doubt, he can ask any ex-IBMer.
Yes. Fascinating, thank you.
I just found a Matt Stoller article that has a bit different, but compatible, take on the same thing. You can scroll down to the "counterfeit capitalism" heading.
He can’t. It’s all fantasy land.
The myth of the 90% tax rate is just that. A myth.
You have to compare deductions from the time vs the current tax code. It’s harder to deduct now than in the past
That article says the corporate tax was 30% to 52%, AND that the individual income tax got up to 90%. What you call myth is very much true.
And corporate tax is much much lower now than it was then and we have rampant income consolidation to the top earners.
Since January 1, 2018, the nominal federal corporate tax rate in the United States of America is a flat 21% following the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_States
Yeah we have some of the high corporate taxes in the world. So If your thesis was correct, you’d see this everywhere but you don’t.
Companies are sitting all billions on dollars offshore because of our high taxes.
No the article clearly points out nobody was paying that tax rate. Everyone paid a much lower tax rate. Having it set to 90%, doesn’t matter if nobody pays it.
Last time I checked, Bill Clinton repealed glass steagall not Reagan. I feel like there is a bigger argument that this action has more impact than all the trickle down economics theory Reagan brought.
much of that was defanged in the 80's and clinton signed it when it was passed by the two majority republican legislatures. Its not like he was a big proponent he just decided not to fight that battle.
I have actually never heard this argument.
The way I understand it is glass steagalls main role was to limit bank investments. I have read that Clinton repealled because it allowed for global markets to start. Then we started getting banks overspeculating and the eventual bubble of 2008. This then prompted the fangless Dodd Frank act to go through but it didnt stop banks from acting as their own insurance anyway when silicon valley thing happened this year.
Thats how I know it. If you have sources otherwise my infant brain would love to know.
The history of glass steaguall is not really an argument including it being limited way before its demise in the 90's. Since its not an appeal to authority here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_legislation#Decline_and_repeal
What you have shows that they found a supposed "loophole" but there is some problems with that. It was basically not applicable to most banks until the repeal of glass steagall. Frank-Dodd even tried to save pieces as a result of the 2008 crisis. Below are sections within glass steagall that were repealled.
Section 16 -
This section sets out the permissible securities activities of national banks (12 U.S.C. § 24 (Seventh)). No bank covered by Section 16's prohibitions could buy, sell, underwrite, or distribute any security except as specifically permitted by Section 16. It prohibits banks from being a "market maker" or otherwise "dealing" in non-government (i.e., "bank-ineligible") securities.
Section 20-
This section prohibited member banks from affiliating with firms engaged principally in securities activities (formerly codified at 12 U.S.C § 377). Section 20 only prohibited a bank from affiliating with a firm "engaged principally" in underwriting, distributing, or dealing in securities.
Section 32-
This section prohibited officer, director, and employee interlocks between member banks and securities firms (formerly codified at 12 U.S.C § 78). Under Section 32, a bank could not share employees or directors with a company "primarily engaged" in underwriting, distributing, or dealing in securities.
The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 (GLBA) repealed Sections 20 and 32. Sections 16 and 21 remained in effect until Clinton signed the repeal 8 days after GLBA took effect. Since its repeal, these sections have been tried to be reinstated in an attempt to seperate commercial banking from investment banking.
The Dodd-Frank Act had the Volcker rule (§ 619), which was an attempt to reinstate only a part of glass steagall (section 20). This rule essentially limited proprietary trading by banks and their affiliates to stop speculative trading. This is all we have now and apponents to the glass steagall sections also say we should have had something planned as a replacement.. but we didnt. If you think we were toothless back then, you can assume we are 100% toothless now.
Too lazy to link sources.
This would make sense as globilization while going on since ww2 ended accelerated in the 80's. Once the provisions there were eliminated it would effectively allow banks to offshore the activity anyway which made just eliminating it in the 90's to make more sense. Since they were effectively doing it anyway.
Name a couple policies, and there's a good chance a Regan policy was a step before that.
I'm honestly not an expert on economic policy, but do you seriously think the effects from Hitler didn't even last for 40 years? I mean ffs, we will be feeling the effects from that mess for the remainder of Humanity.
That dude out here tryna argue the whole Hitler-Nazi thing blew over after a few years. Oof
I can make up a list of things to blame instead of root causes as well, doesn't mean those root causes don't exist.
You don't have a response?
He undid a lot of protections that were put in place after the Great Depression, and it's been taking forever to fix them. Like stock buybacks.
Just like how we cut taxes to the rich under Trump and are now running a budget deficit.
Reagan gutted federal oversight boards from the FCC to the SEC, he was explicitly the anti-regulatory president who preferred self-regulated corporations. Reagan lowered the highest tax rate from 70% to 37%, and due to the aforementioned changes these companies were able to use the excess funds on Stock Buybacks rather than reinvesting into the industries. The US Federal Government has been rocking back and forth in and out of massive federal deficit, last having a surplus under the short Clinton administration, as a result the Federal Government is constantly cutting or limiting social programs like food, healthcare, veterans care, retirement funds, etc. Reagan was a turning point in wages in the United States, and while that isn't necessarily directly his fault there is no debating that his presidency aligns perfectly with the beginning of the current ever widening wealth gap and wage stagnation, likely because of the aforementioned stock buybacks taking priority over investment in the business. USA Industry has not taken off in the ways he expected it would, in fact since the 80s the USA has floundered compared to the EU or China in terms of industry, as a measure of GDP Growth Rate, and prosperity, as a measure of average health and happiness. One other factor than Reagan in this might be the Civil Rights Movement from the 60s, more than a decade before Reagan, which has lead down the long path of political polarization of congress as a result of Democrat President Lindon B Johnson being the one who signed the Civil Rights Act as well as several Welfare laws including the creation of the S.N.A.P. food stamps. Still, Reagan severely damaged Campaign finance laws while fighting to end all limits to campaign finances, which also lead to politicians with more access to wealth having much better chances of getting into office and somewhat more political polarization on the basis of average campaign contributions being skewed. Under Reagan, the American Antitrust policy eliminated all section 2 cases of Monopoly, under his administration several large brands dominated markets in ways often compared to the Gilded Age market concentrations that preceded the Great Depression.
One step in the right direction to fix some of what Reagan broke would be to enact something like H.R.1 For the People Act that the Democrats put forward after retaking the Congressional House, but it was left to die under the Mitch McConnell senate leadership, then it was left out to dry in the 48D:50R senate divide despite 2 Independents caucusing with the D to make 50:50 and Vice President giving the tiebreaker vote to select a Democrat speaker, theres still not really enough support to pass large scale meaningful reform.
###So the TLDR version is he intentionally damaged our politics and regulatory systems in a way that we are not capable of fixing without some massive change in our society. Fuck Reagan.
If you have to ask....
Biden is Reagan's 11th term
He led the charge to get the US off the gold standard, which many regard as a bad move because it was. And this hasn't been reversed or adjusted since, which is why it is linked to this particular dipshit.
FDR pulled us off gold in 1933 after a bunch of bank failures, Nixon officially ended it in 1971.
Neither were bad moves.
Oops, Nixon my bad. I confuse lying shitstains sometimes.
Glad average wages in the US didn't massively stagnate starting in the early 1970s. If they had, the connection would be hard to argue against.
(/s)
He led the charge to get the US off the gold standard, which many regard as a bad move because it was.
It was neither Reagan nor a bad move, and goldbugs are living in the 19th century, drinking too much laudanum for their own good.
It isn’t. People love to blame Reagan but his policies helped fuel the growth in the 90’s.
NAFTA is what destroyed the middle class. It’s the one black eye from an otherwise impressive run from bill Clinton.
My dad was a gm auto worker. Lots of time off until Regan’s policies kicked in then couldn’t work enough. Lost his job when nafta kicked in and they shipped it to Mexico.
If Regan’s policies were so bad then why haven’t the last three democrats presidents removed them ?
Here is an article on Reganomics. https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa261.pdf
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa261.pdf
Pouring concentrated sugar down someone's throat will give them an energy boost, but there will be consequences if you do too much.
That was Reagan's policies. Most of the "wealth" generated only existed on paper.
Take GE as an example. They used to have a bunch of factories and products that they made in those factories. Then the 80s hit and Jack Welch took over as CEO. He scrapped the factories and had GE start outsourcing, well, everything. He also used the GE financial department as an illegal bank.
Anyway, the stock price went through the roof, because GE could always claim that they were making all sorts of profit with no expenses... except the truth was that they were basically just an unregulated bank with some product branding deals.
They've gone bankrupt a few times now.
That's how most of the Reaganomics worked. Paper profits as the real wealth went into the hands of the super rich.
That is such a strange and illogical take on things.
GE problems predate Regan. It was bad management.
Here is an another more logical take that more consistent with other experts.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Lights-Out#:~:text=GE's fall is not the,from J.P. Morgan's namesake bank).
If you can cite Regan as the failure of GM I’d love to see it. I’ve never seen anyone try to make that link before.
The bad management was Jack Welch, and his bullshit was only possible due to Reagan loosening regulations on businesses.
"legendary CEO" my ass. Dude was a fucking disaster.
You have a cite for that as that does again every expert in the field.
So I like to see where you’re getting this data. Since jack was brought In to save the company. It’s really strange to blame him for saving the company.
Strange? Accurate.
He took a healthy company that turned a consistent profit in to a house of cards built on lies. It blew up the stock price for a decade or two before the cracks began to show.
Jack Welch was 100% about short term profit at the expense of long term stability.
His stack ranking fucked over thousands at GE alone, and countless more at all the companies who followed suit. It was and still is a brain-dead policy.
The list goes on, but it all boils down to taking an innovative company and turning it into an unregulated bank, an unregulated bank that was at the heart of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis.
Did you ignore the previous article which shows the issues predate jack and jack is the one who saved the company?
I’m no fan of jack for many reasons but had he not been the ceo, there would have been no Ge today
Yes, because that article was garbage that had its lips firmly glued to Jack Welshes taint.
GE has a 7% rise in profits from 1979 into 1980. And spoiler, there is no GE today. It's been broken up after it was pulled from the S&P due to massive financial fraud and bankruptcy, all due to following Jack Welsh's management style.
https://www.ge.com/investor-relations/stocks
Ge is till a company
For the moment, but soon it will be three companies.
All because of the fraud.
Imagine citing the cato institute in 2023