General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: We romanticize manufacturing jobs when what we really miss are unions. [View all]stevenleser
(32,886 posts)To understand Reagan you have to understand one important thing that happened before him. During Carter's Presidency, the Iranian revolution of 1979 caused a drop in the production of oil that sparked a panic and an energy crisis. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_energy_crisis
This caused a nasty stagflation where prices increased and inflation hit double digits at the same time the supply of goods decreased.
This was crushing to the economy and painted Carter as bad with the economy and Republicans used that to convince the public that all Democratic Presidents would be bad for the economy. As the new Iranian government began to understand how to deal with its oil sector, the flow of oil resumed its normal levels. Unfortunately this did not happen until Reagan was President. The price of oil and gas dropped nearly 50% during Reagan's first two years in office due to absolutely nothing that he did. Anytime you see oil and gas drop that much the economy takes off like a rocket ship, so Reagan's economic policies got the credit even though they did nothing and in fact caused a lot of long term damage. He is the first President since the second world war to run a massive deficit. He increased government spending by a huge amount, mostly on the military and decreased government revenue by decreasing taxes.
The Federal government has mostly been running deficits ever since. That is Reagan's legacy. Unfortunately, the perception of what happened under Reagan is that lowering taxes improved the economy. No Republican President since has been successful with those policies.
Republicans, who before Reagan used to be for lower taxes and lower spending (just look at the federal budgets of Nixon and Eisenhower, give lip service to low spending and try to lower taxes.