THE DECLINE OF A ONCE GREAT NATION,THE CAUSE? FLUFFY MINDED PC LIBERALISM AND THE IDIOTS IT PRODUCES

LBJ took the SS funds and included them in the total budget numbers so that they were not a separate budget item. And yes, he did borrow against the fund. the problem came when the ss fund had NO money to borrow from 1971-1978.
It was Reagan who raised the SS tax on the nation (those of us who were the working middle class) and then he changed the rules again and borrowed HEAVILY from the fund. 100 times more than LBJ or Nixon did.

Learn your history!

Freddie and Fannie were set in place to try are restore the wealth to the middle class that was lost during the years 1982-1988. They were a direct outcome of Reagan's policies of favoring the wealthy, but the wealthy banks once again screwed up the system because they were unregulated (something that Reagan did in 1983)
No matter how you cut it, every economic problem we have today was started or made worse by Reagan's economic disaster.

"...Recent troubles in the American economy can be attributed to a weakening of business regulation in the public interest, which is, in large part, a consequence of Reagan's anti-government preaching. In the absence of oversight, lending became a wildcat enterprise. Mortgage brokers easily deceived home buyers by promoting sub-prime loans, and then they passed on bundled documents to unwary investors.

Executives at Fannie Mae packaged both conventional and sub-prime loans, and they too, operated almost free of serious oversight. Fannie's leaders spent lavishly to hire sixty Washington lobbyists who showered congressmen with campaign funds. Executives at Fannie were generous to the politicians because they wanted to ward off regulation. Meanwhile, on Wall Street, brokerage firms became deeply committed to risky mortgage investments and did not make their customers fully aware of the risks. The nation's leading credit rating agencies, in turn, were not under much pressure to question claims about mortgage-based instruments that were marketed as blue chip quality. Government watchdogs were not active during those times to serve the interests of the public and the investors. . . Reagan's views of the relationship between government and business helped to put the nation and the world into a good deal of trouble. It is time to recognize that the former president's understanding of economics was not as sophisticated as his enthusiastic supporters often claimed."

When one has a point that is stated and the opponent wants to debate those facts, the opponent must come up with something to refute the argument at hand.
I have given you and the other debator enough information to refute and so far neither you or he has put up any numbers, charts graphs, etc., to prove anyting. So, as I said to him, put up or shut up.

Debate this:
Taxes, Economics, and Standard of Living
Although Ronald Reagan actually instituted one of the largest tax hikes in US history, he and the fiscal conservatives started their campaign to drastically reduce the top tax rate for the rich. At the same time,the tax burden ion the middle class increased by a raised payroll tax.
The conservative tax policy that unleashed the class war that ended the period known as the Great Compression (which followed the Great Depression), and was the terminus of an era where single income families enjoyed plenty of jobs, economic opportunity, and a larger degree of social mobility.

This in turn created the phenomena of wealth consolidation to go into overdrive, starting the drive towards income disparity and a gulf between rich and poor that hasn’t been seen since the Great Depression, a new conservative era known as The Great Divergence.

Ronald Reagan and the conservatives ushered in an era of unbridled greed. An increasing amount of the share of the pie of wealth that is created by labor was gobbled up by those most well off to begin with.

The rich have reaped the vast majority of every economic expansion over the last 30 years, including the top 1% gaining two thirds of it in recent years. The top 0.1% have seen a 94% income growth since 2002. The richest of them all (the top 400) have seen an astounding 476% increase since 1992. The richest 74 people made as much as the 19 million lowest-paid people in America.

Today there is a higher Gini-Coefficient (which measures the wealth disparity in a nation) than the Great Depression. The US now ranks 42nd from the worst in the world in terms of the gulf between rich and poor, slightly worse than Iran, Nigeria, and Cambodia.

Currently, one third of all the pay in the United States is raked in by corporate executives. In 1970, the average CEO made 28 times what an average worker at his company made. By 2005, this had swelled to 465 times what an average worker made. This is phenomena exclusive to the US, and is not shared by other developed Western nations like Japan where an average CEO makes less than 20x what an average worker does.

Deficits and the National Debt

This is perhaps the most ironic part of the Reagan Legacy. He railed against the national debt, even though it was decreasing with every president from FDR to Carter. As soon as Reagan and the fiscal conservatives took control over economic policy, the very thing they talked about the most started to grow.

The national debt nearly tripled under Reagan. We see a sudden change in the trendline for the national debt as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product as soon as Reagan became president as well. At the same time, reagan after raisding the workers contributions to the Social Security Fund, borrowed heavily from it to try and balance a budget that fell well short because of less tax income from the wealthy.
In fact, Reagan and the Bushes are responsible for over 93% of the national debt:

Since the election of Reagan and the conservatives in 1980, America has been on a downward spiral. The charts above are just the tip of the iceberg, but demonstrate in no uncertain terms that we are on the wrong track in America. From turning the United States into a police state with the highest incarceration rate in the world, to waging class warfare on the poor so the rich can get richer, to massively ballooning the national debt, the Reagan Legacy is disastrous.

I have posted nothing? You have yet to answer regarding the SS trust fund issue created by Lyndon Johnson.

You were flat out wrong about Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, and you have yet to name the specific Acts or regulations involved in the mortgage and finance arena the Reagan admnistration that allegedly caused the recent housing crash. Mind you, much of what was involved in the S & L crisis was handled with FIRREA in the late '80s/early '90s.

The graphs you have posted above are not able to be identified as to the source, nor can anyone click on them to view them in their entirety. The verbiage is of unknown source as well and contains far more hyperbole and opinion than fact. I am not one of your young heads full of mush waiting to be fed what I must know to pass an upcoming exam you produce.

The income disparity between the CEOs and the average worker has been a topic of rant from the socialists since the Reagan years, however it was not an issue of a grand conspiracy of the rich guys to steal from the common man. Can it be attributed to the Reagan years? Yes, but not as a stripping of wealth from the middle class. It is because CEO pay is directly tied to the value of the firms, which increased 6 fold over the approximate course of time you mentioned. That nasty growing economy! (note: sarcasm inflection) Firms pay for CEO talent. It is a fact. Do I as the operator of the bottle machine 'deserve' a significant chunk of the CEO of Pepsi? Get real. I'm paid for my skill. If I want better, I get better. If I want to whine about it, I ascribe to the old 'income inequality' mantra that quite honestly is dripping in covetous, sense of entitlement to what my neighbor has that I don't.

http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shi...

LBJ moved how the SS funds were accounted for and that carried over through 3 presidents. LBJ did borrow from the fund as did Nixon, BUT by 1973 there was no surplus from which to borrow. Reagan raised the SS tax in 1981 and in 2 years there was a surplus and it kept growing and Reagan borrowed more from that fund than did any other President. This is from the SS website.

Income disparity will lead to ruin. Why? Because the products and services have to be consumed by the people in the economy.
We do not need 1 person buying a $90,000 car. We need 6 people buying $15,000 cars. They will buy tires, repairs, etc. BY cutting wages and increasing corporate profit margins, the economy will fail. The economy DOES run from the bottom up and not the top down. This was proven in 1929 when we had a back log of finished goods and nobody had enough money to buy them (not eve the workers who made them), but those at the top had lots of money. Henry Ford knew this and paid his workers more than anybody else so that they could afford to purchase the products that they made.
If you do not have a viable middle class, you will never have a sustainable economy and to have a stable middle class you have to pay them. No one in this country, not a movie star, an athlete, or a CEO is worth more than a million dollars. That they get paid enormous sums is part of the problem. When the stadiums are empty because the average worker can not attend the games, the system falls apart. The same goes for groceries, gasoline, etc.

One set of graphs are available with the text at:
rationalrevolution.net/articl...
More at:
http://blog.ourfuture.org/201...

In 1929 we had deflation. The money supply was shrinking and demand was down such that prices declined. Your example is of an absolute worst case scenario. Not the everyday norm at all.

The middle class is not built upon income redistribution. It is built upon a thriving economy, reasonable taxes, good international trade balance, reasonable regulatory policy, and as much free market principles as can be done. Some regulation is necessary, but much of the market balances in it's own self regulating fashion. Where it starts having problems is when we have the government intervening.

The middle class has been destroyed by many factors, but not your anti-Reagan BS. You might ought to investigate what was happening to the middle class in Jimmy Carter's era. Oh, but you have. Your type has come up with a re-write of history to cannonize the jackazz as a victim of the debt of Viet Nam. (wait, that was LBJ largely again, wasn't it?)

We began losing our command on the international market for goods in the 1950's as the rest of the world began recovering from WWII and catching up in the raw materials, mining, manufacturing, etc. It was then that we began to become non-competitive in our wages and the unions kept on with their greed. By the '70's it was a done deal. We'd lose steel, textiles, our command on the auto industry, etc.

I see socialist/lib types point to the high tax rates during the prosperity of the '50's and falsely think they've got a cause/effect argument going. It's so false. They cannot begin to explain the mechanics or ecnomic theory as to why they think the two go hand in hand. The fact of the matter is, that was the twilight years of our world market domination. We prospered IN SPITE of union wages over paying janitors and piece workers and IN SPITE of high tax rates at the top. Further, the percentage of people who were actually affected by that top rate was incredibly small.

The answers are NOT, and I mean absolutely not lying in the control of who makes how much and redistribution. Just look to those countries that have tried such government micro managing tactics in the past.

What you say about he 1950-70's is only partly true, and could have been handled in an easier way with much less damage to this country.

It was NOT necessary to do what Reagan did, and he actually made it worse because of his actions.
"..It was also in the decade of the 1980’s that the U.S. was transformed from the world’s largest creditor nation to the world’s largest debtor nation. Throughout the 1980’s conservatives argued that this really didn’t matter."
This was not due to unions or high taxes, it was due to conservative economics that do not work.

If your second paragraph is correct, then The Reagan era should have seen a boon for everyone and not just the top.
Deregulation is what caused the problem. The lack of government control and over sight created a monster that has us now in recession.
Look at it this way: When we had strong unions and high taxes, we had sustained growth and a strong middle class with spendable income.
When we did not have those things, we have recession and unemployment.
How do you compete in a world market? You do it by making lower profits while keeping a stable work force. You make less but you stay in business for a long time. You are driven by what is right and not what Wall Street banks and the stock market expect you to do.

There is a cause and effect here that you fail to, or do not want to, look at.
Outsourcing only made it easier for corporations to make more money at the expense of the economy and the workers.
"..One survey that found that for those working in the 1980’s they were working harder than ever before in the 20th century. Americans leisure time declined 37% between 1973 and 1987--from 26.2 hours per week to 16.6 hours. In addition a new sector of the labor force emerged for the first time in the 1980’s, "the contingent work force". Airlines, supermarket chains, offices and almost all businesses began to hire temporary labor rather than full time workers. It was cheaper and also seriously undermined the power of organized labor. For the first time since the depression a majority of Americans by 1988 could not afford to buy a home."

Real life example; Company a has 1,000 employees doing a job. With outsourcing, they only need 100, so 900 are laid off. The company has less payroll, BUT they keep the cost of their product (service) the same. More profit.
But what is at the end of this spiral?

"...Reagan was a budget-cutter who nearly tripled the federal budget deficit. The biggest problem with Reagan, as we look back at his presidency in search of clues that might help us meet the challenges of today, is that he presented himself — and has since been presented by his admirers — as someone committed to the best interests of ordinary, hard-working Americans. Yet his economic policies, Reaganomics, dealt a body blow to that very constituency.
You cannot be fair in your historical evaluation of Ronald Reagan if you don’t look at the terrible damage his economic policies did to this country.

But when all is said and done, it is the economic revolution that gained steam during the Reagan years and is still squeezing the life out of the middle class and the poor that is Reagan’s most significant legacy. A phony version of that legacy is relentlessly promoted by right-wingers who shamelessly pursue the interests of the very rich while invoking the Reagan brand to give the impression that they are in fact the champions of ordinary people.

Reagan’s son, Ron, says his father “was vulnerable to the idea that poor people were somehow poor because it was their fault.” Ronald Reagan said that, “The homeless are homeless, you might say, by choice.”

The product of conservative economics and deregulation?- unemployment and recession.

Sorry, but Reagan's boom was a one hit wonder. It was mainly for the top and the middle class and the poor saw no great boom. Check the sources on the economic status of the poor and middle class for the years 1981-1988.

Middle class wages stagnated. The buying power of the dollar in 1984 was the same as that of 1973. People worked more and took home less. The poverty level rose faster than at any previous time.

Where are you getting your information?



"..By 1985, the number of low-income renter households had grown to 8.9 million, an addition of 3.3 million units.
Another of Reagan’s enduring legacies is the steep increase in the number of homeless people, which by the late 1980s had swollen to 600,000 on any given night – and 1.2 million over the course of a year. Many were Vietnam veterans, children and laid-off workers."

"...The Reagan/Bush legacy is now painfully apparent for many Americans. As the nation’s wealth was concentrated in the top few percentiles, the middle class stagnated and shrank – and the ranks of the desperate poor have swelled.
A survey by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University found 37 percent of young families with children stuck in a life of poverty last year. That level was even worse than the survey’s previous high of 36 percent in 1988, the end of the first round of Reagan economic policies."
"..For three decades we’ve artificially kept middle class wage increases far below the growth rate of the economy, and this trend has been even more pronounced over the past eight years. This has created an enormous pool of extra money that’s been — yes — strip mined and redirected to the rich."

That is Reagan's Legacy for the nation!