All right, I know I probably shouldn't have done it, but I wrote the dumb schmuck. Here's what I wrote:
To Ted Rall,
I missed you on "Hannity and Colmes". Sorry, but I'm going to have to limit my comments to what I read in your blog.
First of all, I have a friend who was a student in the Granada Medical school that was under siege. And it was indeed under siege. The fact that there were no enemy soldiers inside the building doesn't mean that the students or teachers were free to leave. They were being held hostage. Of course, if we had done nothing and those students had died, you would be ranting about how ineffective Reagan was in protecting Americans abroad.
Second, the soldiers (if you can call them that) that were faced by the US troops in Granada were CUBAN REGULARS!!! In other words, Cuba invaded Granada. That, in military parlance, is what they call an ACT OF WAR. Of course, if they were invited in by the Granadan government, that would make holding those students under siege an act of war by Granada, wouldn't it? Either way, Reagan was right to send in the US Military to respond to an act of war in which US citizens' lives were in danger.
Third, Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union single-handedly. It was HIS policies that forced the Soviet Union to become active in multiple theatres (Asia, the Middle East, Africa, South America). He forced them to spend money trying to find a defense against an SDI system that didn't even exist. In short, he bankrupted the Soviets.
"But wait, that wasn't all Reagan's fault, it was the fault of the Soviets and of the policies of the Presidents that came before him," is what you will argue. Or maybe not--- I'm not sure if you're smart enough to have thought of it on your own.
The Soviet Union had been tottering on the edge of bankruptcy for decades. So what. If they were having cash flow problems, they jus stopped feeding a million people or so. They had done it before, and there was no reason to believe that they wouldn't have kept on doing so, if they were able. They sure as hell didn't care if a few more people starved to death for the benefit of the Motherland. But Reagan had the Soviets spending so much money in so many different direction that even starving its own people to death couldn't improve their cash flow enough to pull them out of bankruptcy. Reagan won the Cold War because he understood that the Cold War had turned into a war of attrition, and that our economic system was better suited to survive a war of attrition... even if we ran up deficits to do it. Nobody in the USA ever starved to death because of a US budget deficit. And guess what: Reagan was right.
Fourth, he cut taxes at ALL LEVELS of income. His supply-side economics created more jobs than any of the previous 3 presidents did. He paved the way for the economic boom that we saw in the late 80s and the 90s... a decade that saw more millionaires created from the middle class than any other in history, and a decade in which employment was extremely high, and employees ruled the job market. According to William Niskanen and Stephen Moore of the CATO Institute, 8 out of 10 economic factors measured performed better during the Reagan years than in the Ford/Carter years or the Bush/Clinton Years.
- Economic Growth. The average annual growth rate of real gross domestic product (GDP) from 1981 to 1989 was 3.2 percent per year, compared with 2.8 percent from 1974 to 1981 and 2.1 percent from 1989 to 1995. The 3.2 percent growth rate for the Reagan years includes the recession of the early 1980s, which was a side effect of reversing Carter's high-inflation policies, and the seven expansion years, 1983-89. During the economic expansion alone, the economy grew by a robust annual rate of 3.8 percent. By the end of the Reagan years, the American economy was almost one-third larger than it was when they began. Figure 1 (go to the website---Elliot) shows the economic growth rate by president since World War II. That rate was higher in the 1980s than in the 1950s and 1970s but was substantially lower than the rapid economic growth rate of more than 4 percent per year in the 1960s. The Kennedy income tax rate cuts of 30 percent that were enacted in 1964 generated several years of 5 percent annual real growth.
- Economic Growth per Working-Age Adult. When we adjust the economic growth rates to take account of demographic changes, we find that the expansion in the Reagan years looks even better and that the 1970s' performance looks worse. GDP growth per adult aged 20-64 in the Reagan years grew twice as rapidly, on average, as it did in the pre- and post-Reagan years.
- Median Household Incomes. Real median household income rose by $4,000 in the Reagan years--from $37,868 in 1981 to $42,049 in 1989... This improvement was a stark reversal of the income trends in the late 1970s and the 1990s: median family income was unchanged in the eight pre-Reagan years, and incomes have fallen by $1,438 in the anti-supply-side 1990s, following the 1990 and 1993 tax hikes. Most of the declines in take-home pay occurred on George Bush's watch. Under Bill Clinton's tenure, there has been zero income growth in median household income.
- Employment. From 1981 through 1989 the U.S. economy produced 17 million new jobs, or roughly 2 million new jobs each year. Contrary to the Clinton administration's claims of vast job gains in the 1990s, the United States has averaged only 1.3 million new jobs per year in the post-Reagan years. The labor force United States has averaged only 1.3 million new jobs expanded by 1.7 percent per year between 1981 and 1989, but by just 1.2 percent per year between 1990 and 1995.
- Hours Worked. Table 1 confirms that hours worked per adult aged 20-64 grew much faster in the 1980s than in the pre -or post-Reagan years.
- Unemployment Rate. When Reagan took office in 1981, the unemployment rate was 7.6 percent. In the recession of 1981-82, that rate peaked at 9.7 percent, but it fell continuously for the next seven years. When Reagan left office, the unemployment rate was 5.5 percent. This reduction in joblessness was a clear triumph of the Reagan program. Figure 3 shows that in the pre-Reagan years, the unemployment rate trended upward; in the Reagan years, the unemployment rate trended downward; and in the post-Reagan years, the unemployment rate has fluctuated up and down but today remains virtually unchanged from the 1989 rate.
- Productivity. For real wages to rise, productivity must rise. Over the past 30 years there has been a secular downward trend in U.S. productivity growth. Under Reagan, productivity grew at a 1.5 percent annual rate, as shown in Figure 4. This was lower than in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s but much higher than in the post-Reagan years. Under Clinton, productivity has increased at an annual rate of just 0.3 percent per year--the worst presidential performance since that of Herbert Hoover.
- Inflation. The central economic evil that Ronald Reagan inherited in 1981 from Jimmy Carter was three years of double-digit inflation. In 1980 the consumer price index (CPI) rose to 13.5 percent. By Reagan's second year in office, the inflation rate fell by more than half to 6.2 percent. In 1988, Reagan's last year in office, the CPI had fallen to 4.1 percent. Figure 5 shows the inflation and interest rate trend.
- Interest Rates. In 1980 the interest rate on a 30-year mortgage was 15 percent; this rate rose to its all-time peak of 18.9 percent in 1981. The prime rate steadily fell over the subsequent six years to a low of 8.2 percent in 1987 as the inflationary expectation component of interest rates fell sharply. The prime rate hit its 20-year low in 1993 at 6.0 percent. The Treasury Bill rate also fell dramatically in the 1980s--from 14 percent in 1981 to 7 percent in 1988. In the 1990s, interest rates have continued to migrate gradually downward...
- Savings. The savings rate did not rise in the 1980s, as supply-side advocates had predicted. In fact, in the 1980s the personal savings rate fell from 8 percent to 6.5 percent. In the 1990s the average savings rate has fallen even further to an average of 4.9 percent --although the rate of decline has slowed.
---from Supply Tax Cuts and the Truth About the Reagan Economic Record, by William Niskanen and Stephen Moore, October 22, 1996. http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-261.html
Seems that Reaganomics isn't quite the unmitigated disaster you would have everyone believe it is.
Fifth, Reagan also built the military into a cohesive and power group that was capable of winning the 'illegal' war in Granada in 48 hours, the first Gulf War in just a few weeks and the current Gulf war in a couple of months. We may not be liked around the world right now, but we are NOT a laughingstock. In fact, we are actually FEARED around the world, which is more effective, politically speaking, than being liked. And it is ALL BECAUSE OF REAGAN!!!
Quoting from Ralph Peters... who was there at the time:
IN 1976, I joined the U.S. Army as a private. Our military was broken. My first unit, in Germany, had trucks built in the 1940s, inadequate winter clothing, inept medical care and an atmosphere of pessimism. We were not "combat ready."
Had "the balloon gone up," our Infantry would have entered battle in death-trap M113s that were no match for Soviet infantry combat vehicles. Our tanks couldn't rival the firepower of the new Russian models. Our radios were unreliable and the antique encryption devices rarely worked.
Our war games weren't about winning but about losing as slowly as possible. We always had to resort to nukes in the end.
Then came Ronald Reagan.
Yes, he raised Defense budgets dramatically. And the money mattered. But the increased funding and higher pay wouldn't have made a decisive difference without the sense that we had a real leader in the White House again. The man in the Oval Office genuinely admired the men and women who served. When he saluted his Marine guards, he meant it. The troops could tell.
I attended Officer Candidate School in Georgia during the 1980 presidential election. When I returned to Germany in late 1981, the change in the quality and morale of the "dirty boots" Army was already unmistakable. Even before the new equipment began arriving, the Army was regaining its fighting spirit.
We still had some bad apples — but fewer with every infusion of new, better-educated recruits. Officers were held to ever-higher standards. The young sergeants coming up had an energy and optimism that had been missing for years, while the senior NCOs who lasted were the toughest and best of them all. And our new generals, men who had commanded battalions and brigades in Vietnam, had learned the right lessons.
New gear began to arrive. Training budgets increased. We even replaced our janitor-style uniforms with camouflage fatigues. We looked like soldiers again.
We had a president who cared about us, a man who was proud of us and proud of the country we were pledged to defend. He even understood the power of uniforms and would not enter the Oval Office himself unless wearing a tie.
Ronald Reagan brought down the Soviet Union. After all the academic arguments about the USSR's internal weakness and the inevitability of its ultimate failure, the truth is that none of those who speak so knowingly now had the strategic insight of an aging former actor when it mattered.
Which brings me to my confession. Having grown up in the late ླྀs and early ྂs, I carried some of my generation's prejudices along with me into the Army. While I realized that Jimmy Carter had been an inept president (if a good man), I didn't support Ronald Reagan in 1980. I believed that Carter remained the safer of two mediocrities. I bought into the bigotry of those who mocked Reagan as lacking the intelligence to be president.
And it's doubtless true that he didn't possess the highest IQ ever to enter the White House. That goes directly to what Reagan taught me: As we recently saw with another president, the greatest intelligence isn't a substitute for vision, courage and leadership. Above all, a president needs good instincts, guts and sound values. The world's overstocked with brilliant people who never get anything done.
Reagan got things done.
He gave us the military that serves the cause of freedom so well today. He gave us back our pride. And he gave us back our country.
If that wasn't clear from the campus, it was obvious to those of us in the mud on the frontiers of freedom.
--- Excerpts from the New York Post, Reagan to the Rescue, By Ralph Peters, Opinion Column, June 9, 2004.
I believe that I'll take the word of a soldier, and officer who was THERE as it was happening over the word of a guy who's greatest sacrifice was that his best friends lost their scholarships and he didn't have anyone to play with anymore... oh, and just missing that Pulitzer must have been tough too. Boo hoo hoo. Sorry, that doesn't qualify you as more of an expert on the effects of Ronald Reagan's policies on military affairs than someone who was in the military as it was happening.
Finally, with regard to AIDS, Reagan spent $5.7 BILLION on AIDS research... more than any president before or since, with the exception of George Bush. No disease has ever received that much for research from s single president. Not cancer, not kidney disease, not MD. So when you claim that Reagan let hundreds of thousands of AIDS victims die without bating an eyelash, you're not being very truthful on the matter, are you? What pisses you and every other liberal off about Reagan is that he didn't let his $5.7 BILLION support for AIDS research translate into a support for gay rights. If Reagan had backed gay rights, while spending the exact same amount of money on AIDS, liberals would have loved him for 'supporting AIDS sufferers'. But he didn't support gay rights, and THAT is what upsets you so much.
I don't expect you to place this on your blog page. Frankly, I don't think you have the guts to post an e-mail with well-reasoned arguments and historical fact to back it up. You would prefer to dredge up the lowest-comon-denominator e-mails you can find... the ones with vitriol and hate and no logic to them, because that is where you feel most comfortable, and you can argue with them on their level. But I'm cheating... I'm using logic and fact to back up my political point of view. No fair. So no, I don't expect you to post this message online.
Now, go back to drawing pictures to make yourself understood, little boy, and leave the political discussions to the big boys who aren't too lazy to do 10 minutes of research before jumping to an opinion. If you're America's BS detector, do you start beeping every time you walk into a room?
Oh, and by the way, Maggie Thatcher, who has suffered several strokes recently and can barely move, can still kick your pansy ass. Just so you didn't think I had gotten too far from my Right-Wing, gun-totin' roots.
Elliot |
