The Reagan Legacy

 

Also...

- Reagan and Bush 41 also experienced the Savings and Loan debacle, thanks largely to Reagan deregulating them. At the time, it was the largest political and financial scandal in US history--orders of magnitude larger than the traditionally cited instances of capitalism gone to seed like Teapot Dome and Credit Mobilier. The bailout (including interest) was roughly a half trillion dollars. Of course Clinton/Newt's deregulation created the 70-times-larger subprime/derivatives meltdown now called the "Global Financial Crisis" (GFC). The Federal Reserve's response to the GFC - $29 trillion in bailout, now down to ~$8 trillion on the Fed's books.

- The Reagan recovery prompted by those tax cuts and record-holding increase in national debt was called "Morning in America" by the Wall St. Journal. It was an average business cycle recovery with lower-than-average capital investment.

 

That graph comes from Statista, but ultimately from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Note the two much larger peaks at the beginning of the graph. The source of those are the New Deal and that big public works project we call World War II. That's when the government took over 50% of the economy. The Green New Deal would take 5% of the economy now.

- Systemic problems are disguised by the "rugged individualism" but systemic solutions, not individual solutions are all that can solve such problems. Crime is a good example of a problem with a large systemic component. The US incarcerates (per-capita) seven times more than Canada or France, yet its crime rate is not significantly lower. Meanwhile, the US suffers more than a half million medical bankruptcies annually. Single-payer countries (like Canada and France) don't have such bankruptcies. So...a half million plus desperate people are generated by US healthcare. Could that lead to crime? The plot of "Breaking Bad" is the story of a husband who couldn't pay his wife's hospital bills, so he starts cooking meth. The US system of cruel social policies and draconian incarceration is a recipe to increase criminality.