It's always fun to go back and read up on the Reagan Legacy Project and the facts (somebody mentioned facts, right) about his record. And this doesn't even mention Iran-Contra, providing amnesty to illegals, the freeing of the mentally ill, James Watt and the environment, etc.
Reagan's average approval rating during the eight years that he was in office was nothing spectacular - 52.8 percent, according to Gallup. That places the 40th president not just behind Kennedy, Clinton and Dwight Eisenhower, but also Lyndon Johnson and George H.W. Bush, neither of whom are talked up as candidates for Mount Rushmore.......
At the height of the Iran-Contra scandal, nearly one-third of Americans wanted him to resign........
In the early 1990s, shortly after Reagan left office, several polls found even the much-maligned Jimmy Carter to be more popular. Only since Reagan's 1994 disclosure that he had Alzheimer's disease - along with lobbying efforts by conservatives, such as Grover Norquist's Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, which pushed to rename Washington's National Airport for the president - has his popularity steadily climbed...........
The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 was, at the time, the largest peacetime tax increase in U.S. history.......
Ultimately, Reagan signed measures that increased federal taxes every year of his two-term presidency except the first and the last............
While wealthy Americans benefitted from Reagan's tax policies, blue-collar Americans paid a higher percentage of their income in taxes when Reagan left office than when he came in...........
his real contributions to the end of the Cold War were his willingness to negotiate arms reductions with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his encouragement of Gorbachev as a domestic reformer. Indeed, a USA Today poll taken four days after the fall of the Berlin Wall found that 43 percent of Americans credited Gorbachev, while only 14 percent cited Reagan...............
This rhetorical flourish didn't stop the 40th president from increasing the federal government's size by every possible measure during his eight years in office...........
Federal spending grew by an average of 2.5 percent a year, adjusted for inflation, while Reagan was president. The national debt exploded, increasing from about $700 billion to nearly $3 trillion...........
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But yea...let's remember the dude who said government was the problem and name a bunch of government shit after him...
