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You would have the same people that dismiss Reagan's presidency as a failure and his attempt to do anything to the Soviet union was meaningless as it was already going to fail, you would have these people then try and tell you about his economic policies.
The most important thing to take note of is Reagan's main focus was to collapse the soviet union. Read those presidential directives. He actually did things counterproductive to growth to help solve inflation. He also did things counterproductive to growth to collapse Russia. Now when the people on this thread talk about a recession from the Reagan years.... What do you expect when a country the size of the soviet union collapses?
Letting the selfish genie out of the bottle, destruction of the social safety net, huge deficits, the depression of 1982, the stock market crash of 1987, handing all that missile technology to China after the Challenger disaster, failure to deal with the AIDS crisis, the wanton criminality of Iran/Contra. Weren't those wonderful times.
I look forward to the archivists delayed release of Presidential papers from the Reagan era. It will be interesting to learn how much other dirt was left swept under the rug for twenty years...
Yeah, but he could make one hell of a speech, tho. His faithful believed anything he told them.
Sounds like YOU"RE the one with the poopy diapers. Hit a nerve, did I? LOL. Indeed things are not always as they seem. Case in point: Your Globama Messiah.
Yes you did, when you added no facual statements and your only contribution was your cheerleading.
Are you going to cut and paste the entire article, one paragraph at a time?
What exactly is the point of this thread, just to worship Reagan?
I understand you were not alive during those years so you are perhaps easily duped by the current Reagan idolizing going on by the GOP.
The sad reality is that is all they have at the moment.....try to go back 2 decades and wistfully think about the "good old days".
Geewiz bily....
You have yet to refute anything posted. Your party is in this revisionism process to try and remove Reagan as a great leader or as anything other than a dunce. Now that you can see a lot of these people don't have a clue about what actually happened. How much credit do you continue to give them? Demonizing Reagan for policies of Bush I, Clinton, Bush II or Obama is just stupid. And I think it's quiet clear Obama has no clue what Reagan did or else he wouldn't be invoking the Gipper when he says he is trying to reverse everything Reagan did.
Of course none of this means anything if you think a nuclear winter would provide good ice skating.
You would have the same people that dismiss Reagan's presidency as a failure and his attempt to do anything to the Soviet union was meaningless as it was already going to fail, you would have these people then try and tell you about his economic policies.
The most important thing to take note of is Reagan's main focus was to collapse the soviet union. Read those presidential directives. He actually did things counterproductive to growth to help solve inflation. He also did things counterproductive to growth to collapse Russia. Now when the people on this thread talk about a recession from the Reagan years.... What do you expect when a country the size of the soviet union collapses?
I don't believe his preisidency was a failure, I happen to credithim for abandoning supply side and moving keynes. I just think it s laughable that these people don't know what his fiscal policy actually was and they try to sell it to us. The Bush administration used Reagan policy atleast in the package it was sold. To bad this administration didn't feel the responsibility that Reagan did when he abandoned it.
SO Big John are you saying Reagans sucess was foriegn policy? I'm confused because the OP had me believe that we were getting a Reagan lecture on domestic policy.
Reagan negotiated lower prices with the Saudis, but I'm not convinced that anyone else wouldn't have taken similar measures due to what was happening at the time.
Quote:
By 1975, the Soviet Union began having serious problems with the output of new oil wells: much higher investment was needed for the current operations to get the same output (see figure 3). But the Soviet Union was fortunate to get unusually high oil prices starting in the mid-1970s
The Story of Grain
In a simplified way, the story of the collapse of the Soviet Union could be told as a story about grain and oil. As for the grain, the turning point that decided the fate of the Soviet Union began with the economic debate of 1928-29, when the discussion centered on what would later be called the "Chinese path" of development. (By several important economic and social indicators, the Soviet Union of that period and China in the late 1970s took similar approaches to reform. See figure 1.) At the time, the head of the Soviet government, Aleksei Rykov, and the chief ideologist of the Communist Party, Nikolai Bukharin, earnestly defended the idea of a path which included preserving private agriculture and the market, and ensuring financial stability--but holding onto the party's political control.
The Soviet leadership ultimately chose another path. The solution preferred by Joseph Stalin was the expropriation of peasants' property, forced collectivization, and extraction of grain. Judging from the available documents, the essence of this decision was relatively simple. Bukharin and Rykov essentially told Stalin: "In a peasant country, it is impossible to extract grain by force. There will be civil war." Stalin answered, "I will do it nonetheless."
The result of the disastrous agriculture policy implemented between the late 1920s and the early 1950s was the sharpest fall of productivity experienced by a major country in the twentieth century. The key problem confronting the Soviet Union was well-expressed in the letter sent by Nikita Khrushchev to his colleagues in the leadership of the party. The letter fundamentally stated: "In the last fifteen years, we have not increased the collection of grain. Meanwhile, we are experiencing a radical increase of urban population. How can we resolve this problem?"
Once again, a serious discussion ensued among Soviet leaders in the early 1950s, resulting in two positions. The first position was to attempt to improve the situation in the agricultural regions outside of the fertile "black soil belt" in southern Russia. The other position was to resolve the problem by utilizing the socialist planning system: large projects and a concentration of resources. Naturally, doubts lingered about whether this strategy would cause even higher fluctuations in long-term production.
But these considerations were ignored and, tactically, the strategy of dramatically expanding the land under cultivation yielded temporary success. Between the mid-1950s and the early 1960s, the amount of the grain produced by the Soviet Union increased significantly. The problem was the limited amount of suitable land and the continuing growth of the population in large cities. Thus, already in the late 1960s, the shortcomings of this plan were evident.
In 1963, Nikita Khrushchev sent a letter to the leaders of the Socialist bloc, informing them that the Soviet Union would no longer be able to supply them with grain. That year, the Soviet state bought 12 million tons of grain--and spent one third of the country's gold reserves to do so. Khrushchev commented: "Soviet power cannot tolerate any more the shame that we had to endure."[2]
Therefore, in the 1960s, state production of grain stabilized and, regardless of attempts by the Soviet leadership, remained fixed at 65 million tons per year until the late 1980s (see figure 2). The cities, however, continued to grow. What policy could succeed if a country had no increase in grain production and an 80 million-person increase in its urban population?
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runs to it when they want to talk about tax cuts. 
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