"Do you think millionaires should pay less taxes than bus drivers?"

[edhopper]

[img][/img]

[Autumn]

1. Holy fucking shit! No way that can be true?

Shit if I had heard that I might would have voted for him, I always turned off the TV when the SOBiscuit came on.

[edhopper]

2. From the horse's mouth

[Autumn]

3. I'm speecless.

Who the fuck would have thought.

[TBF]

5. You need to look deeper

at what he actually did in office. Charismatic presidents are very good and giving pretty speeches and then doing whatever the heck they want behind closed doors.

[Autumn]

10. The man was the most destructive president of my lifetime.

I hated him with the white hot heat of a thousand suns. I couldn't stand to look at him. When he died I spent 200 dollars on a bottle of Dom Perignon.

[TBF]

4. Reagan was king of saying one thing

and doing another -

According to William A. Niskanen, one of the architects of Reaganomics, "Reagan delivered on each of his four major policy objectives, although not to the extent that he and his supporters had hoped", and notes that the most substantial change was in the tax code, where the top marginal individual income tax rate fell from 70.1% to 28.4%, and there was a "major reversal in the tax treatment of business income", with effect of "reducing the tax bias among types of investment but increasing the average effective tax rate on new investment".

More analysis here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics

"Reaganomics" got the economy "going" - but it was at the expense of our most vulnerable citizens.

[edhopper]

6. Yes,

he was.
But this quote should still be used against the Repugs.

[TBF]

8. Thanks for clarifying -

I don't think my stomach is up to worshiping Reagan on DU.

[el_bryanto]

7. I wonder myself whether he was doing it actively and deceptively

or just didn't see the connection.

But then again that amount of disconnect does seem to require a certain amount of willful ignorance so I don't know.

Bryant

[TBF]

9. Reagan was a very smart man -

the question would be how much the dementia had set in by that point. As with GWBush we may never know how much was him & how much was the work of his advisors ...

[hunter]

11. Reagan was a meat-puppet president like George W. Bush.

Before that he was a highly motivated venal prick.

I guess that's "smart" in some ways, but not in any admirable way.

There's tons of Hollywood gossip about him. A small sample:

The actress Piper Laurie said that when she slept with the former U.S. President he bragged to her afterwards about his staying power.

Yet when she complained she was unsatisfied he replied she should see a doctor - because he definitely knew how to make a woman happy.

..

She was just 18 at the time and a virgin - and he was her first love. Reagan was 39 and was actually playing her father in the 1950 drama ‘Louisa’, which is how they got to know each other.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2061105/Piper-Laurie-claims-Ronald-Reagan-bed.html

Word is Nancy captured his heart by...

Oh, bother, never mind.

Ronald Reagan was just nasty, in both politics and life.

I saw him at a public event during his second term as President and it was clear he was an old man who didn't know where the hell he was or why he was there. But his acting skills were still intact and he managed to affably spit out a few sound bites for the television news.

My faith in the free press collapsed that day. I think covering the President was such a prestigious assignment for a journalist that none of them wanted to jeopardize their access.

Or maybe the problem goes much, much deeper than that.

While we in the U.S.A. were mocking "news" in the Soviet Union, our own news was just as carefully managed and manipulated, but in a much more subtle manner.

Now that most mass media is entirely owned by the oligarchy, they don't even have to be subtle about it any more.

[TBF]

12. I don't know any journalists -

my statement comes from academic types who met him years ago (not in the end when he was clearly very ill). I have no idea when he started losing it but I wouldn't be surprised if you are correct and he was largely a puppet as president. All I can tell you with certainty is that his reign was the end of the experiment known as having a middle class in America.