Many Republicans sincerely believe that Ronald Reagan was one of our greatest presidents. In Sunday's New York Times,
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has a wildly different view, that actually "the prime villains behind the mess we’re in were Reagan and his circle of advisers." Here's an excerpt, but definitely read the whole thing; it's a great antidote to the right wing's selective memories and energetic efforts to whitewash history.
... by 1980 the memory of the Depression had faded. Government, declared Reagan, is the problem, not the solution; the magic of the marketplace must be set free. And so the precautionary rules were scrapped.
Together with looser lending standards for other kinds of consumer credit, this led to a radical change in American behavior.
We weren’t always a nation of big debts and low savings: in the 1970s Americans saved almost 10 percent of their income, slightly more than in the 1960s. It was only after the Reagan deregulation that thrift gradually disappeared from the American way of life, culminating in the near-zero savings rate that prevailed on the eve of the great crisis. Household debt was only 60 percent of income when Reagan took office, about the same as it was during the Kennedy administration. By 2007 it was up to 119 percent.
And, of course, as Krugman explains,
"it was the explosion of debt over the previous quarter-century that made the U.S. economy so vulnerable." I'd add our "oil addiction" to the list of causative factors behind our economic problems. And gee, wasn't it Ronald Reagan who reversed President Carter's attempts to get us off of oil, even removing the solar panels from the White House roof just to demonstrate his contempt for renewable energy and his apparent love for Saudi oil forever. Thank you Ronald Reagan!
