as Ronald Reagan a great president? A great California governor before then? An idiot? A lucky guy in the right place at the right time?  I don't know, and I don't really have a strong opinion on it, at least partially since I was too young to observe the Reagan years with any adult sensibility.

I do know that the issue has come up on the blog a few times, and that those discussions are archived on this page, in chronological order. It all began long before Reagan's death, oddly enough:

October 25, 2003

Reader mail from ReaperX:

Concerning Arnie's grim outlooks on the budget, you seem quick enough to defame him for it. But what about the morons who plunged the state into a budget crisis in the first place? They deserve the better portion of the blame, and yet you alotted them none...

Also concerning Arnie, there is precedence for a non-politician turning California's budget around. And I'm speaking, of course, of Ronald Reagan. But one could also point out that he, too, tried to not raise taxes and had to re-nig that promise. But, from what I've read, he did turn the state's budget around, and he did give a tax return when he found that the state actually had a surplus. 

I didn't comment on the budget issue in the first place since I haven't been following the whole story for the years it's been developing.  California is way in debt for the classic reasons: too much spending and not enough income. I don't have a break down of exactly why, but major contributing factors include the multi-billion gouging Enron and other utilities did when they cleverly under-produced electricity to force California to pay far more than fair market price for it.  Tax revenues are way down since the high tech bubble burst and most of those companies were in Silicon Valley.  And spending grew too quickly on the huge tax revenues that came in before the recession set in shortly after Bush took office, 3 years ago.

Also, the Californian love affair with special propositions cripples budget makers by keeping property taxes, especially on businesses, ridiculously low, and forcing X% of spending to go to various specific things every year, whether they need it or not, which gives the budget-makers far less flexibility to react to short term crises.  There's also a lot of blame for the stupid term limits laws we have.  Most people like the idea of term limits when they think about ossified creatures like Strom Thurmond or Jesse Helms clogging up their senate seats for 50 years.  The problem with term limits on the state level is that politicians have to constantly keep raising money for campaigns to run for higher (or at least different) office, since they can't keep the same one for too long, and this makes them far more easily-bought by campaign donating interests.  It also keeps legislators from getting to really know the ropes and know each other, so there's no consistent leadership or trust built up between the parties, and this leads to endless infighting, rather than deal making and good governing.

Which is all interesting (or not) but is essentially irrelevant.  I know all of the above from reading about it recently, but I know it in far too little detail to really break it down and say whose fault it is.  Which is why I haven't been talking about it.

I also don't blame Arnie for not being able to fix it; no one could, it's a very complicated and difficult issue, as Arnie is finally beginning to admit, which was what yesterday's news item was about.  What I do blame Arnie for was campaigning with almost no specific details about anything, and making repeated bullshit promises of magical fixes that were impossible.  And now that he's in office, fairly-elected (sort of) he discovers reality and starts talking about how difficult things will be, since he'll now be held responsible when he can't fix it any more than Gray Davis could have.

As for Reagan, I have no idea what the CA budget did before or after him; I've never read anything about it.  I do know that he created the largest budget deficits in American history once he was the president, mostly due to starting the whole "cut taxes on the rich" strategy that Bush has followed while simultaneously enormously-increasing the military budget.  But that doesn't mean he didn't do good things for CA's budget back when he was governor.

Anyway, the success or failure of one actor turned politician over 30 years ago has no real connection to anything Arnie is doing today, with the economic realities of California and the US and the World so changed over the decades.  I'm not really blaming Arnie, I don't have any solution for the CA budget issue myself, mostly since I pay very little attention to local politics.  It's just clear that there's no way on earth to balance the budget inside of 2 or 3 years, short of massive tax increases or slashing the budget like 50%, which would be a complete disaster for schools and all public services.

But at least I'm not lying about it with sunny and empty promises of miracles.

October 28, 2003

Here's an email from Reaper, following up his last mail that I quoted on Saturday.  In it he compared Arnie to Reagan, and said that since Reagan did wonders with the California budget, perhaps Arnie could also.  I replied that I had no knowledge of what Reagan did with the CA budget when he was governor, but pointed out that once he moved on to president, he racked up far and away the largest budget deficit in US history. (Largest at the time, anyway, it was further increased by Bush I, and then after decreasing somewhat during the economic boom that Clinton presided over, it's of course skyrocketed under Bush II.)

Anyway, here's Reaper's reply to my blog reply:

Ronald Reagen made the deficit mainly in an effort to topple the Soviet Union, and he succeeded in doing it. Had the Soviet Union not been such a threat, I'm nearly convinced that he could have been one of the few presidents to be able to boast a surplus during his administration. But that wasn't the case. He - or I should say his administration - defeated Communism as a dominant world power without even shedding a drop of blood. That feat alone is worth any amount of money required to do it. They way you said it made him sound like he had no capacity to manage a national budget. 

Sorry to drag this on, but it seems like every word you say about Republicans is a bad one. And while my official stance is that all politicians are stupid/vote whores, and neither the Dems or Reps are better than the other, there is some good to be said about their policies or accomplishments. And if you see it that way too, it looks to me like you hide it very well through your writing -- unless a comment from a misguided reader forces you to clarify that you don't completely hate the Republican (usually) in question.

The only reason this bothers me is because you are obviously very intelligent and open minded about everything, and, to me, it sticks out like a sore thumb when you dislike something to the point that you ignore the good things that it does. It may just be a coincidence -- you could just be selecting foibles that you find because you know that will entertain your readers, and commenting on the good they do just doesn't work in that context. And I apologize if that is the case. But I just felt like I should mention this observation to you, if only to get the nagging monkey off of my back...

Well, where to begin. There was quite a bit of blood spilled between the US and USSR during the cold war.  No, we never actually had World War III, but there was intense fighting by proxy (the US supplying one side, USSR the other) in places such as Iran/Iraq, Afghanistan (remember back when the CIA was training and equipping the anti-Soviet rebels who eventually turned into the Taliban?), and Central America, to name just a few, and I'm not even including the no doubt thousands of individuals who died spying for either side, on missions of espionage, and so on.

But that's basically nit-picking, compared to the nuclear Armageddon that might have erupted, and apparently nearly did several times, most famously during the Cuban Missile Crisis, though that was decades before Reagan became president.

As for the whole "Reagan spent the USSR out of existence" that's true in a historical sense.  Although the whole Soviet Bloc didn't actually fall apart until the early 90's, when Bush was in power after Reagan, I'll give credit to Reagan's policies, which Bush I, his VP and predecessor continued. However it's rather a case of hindsight being 20/20 to make it sound like some grand scheme that came to a neat fruition with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I wasn't following the news with laser-like intensity back in the 80's (largely because I was like, 12) but I don't recall anyone ever making any sort of argument about how we were spending the USSR to death, and that the crushing budget deficits that Reagan's economic policies were creating would pay off in the end by bankrupting the USSR.  The spending was justified as necessary for defense, to keep us alive in the face of an impending threat from the USSR, not because it would cause the enemy to crack a decade later.

Once the USSR did fall apart, an event that came as a great surprise to most everyone at the time, including the best sources of US foreign intelligence, it became clear that a major reason was because they had tried to keep up with the US military spending, and with their far less efficient industrial and economic system they'd bankrupted themselves in the effort.  At that point it became vogue for Republicans who had agreed with Reagan's economic policies to trot them out as the killers of the USSR, and while they did work in that way, I don't know of any evidence that would say that was their goal from the beginning.  It's not as if the US military built all of those boats and planes and missiles and military bases around the world just to force the Soviets to do the same since we knew they couldn't afford it in the long run.  And we should be damn grateful that they were commies, and that communism is such a poor economic system, since otherwise they could have better harvested their great resources and those of their captured lands, and we'd probably still be locked like caribou, our horns intertwined with those of the "evil empire" in the divided Eastern and Western Europe.

Okay, the horns metaphor was a bit much.

I'm sure there have been books written on whether or not the US could have spent 25% less on military things (the vast majority of which were never used, fortunately) and still gotten the job done, or whether the tax cuts for the rich and the "trickle down" economics were necessary to go along with the military build up.  But if such books have been written, I haven't read them, so I don't have any way to know.  

For instance, Reagan spent hundreds of millions on the illogical and utterly failed Star Wars system, (AKA "Reagan's Rayguns"), the space missile defense system.  It wasn't even borderline technologically feasible back in the 80's, and it's still not feasible today, billions of dollars later.  Is anyone going to argue that money could not have been better spent improving life for Americans, other than the defense contractors it made richer?  That's just one example, I'm sure any book on the subject could point out enormous graft and waste and stupidity, that if corrected would have gotten the same job done, with far less expense. I can conjecture that we could have spent 1/5 less on military stuff during Reagan's and Bush's years and still bankrupted the USSR, but I don't know that for sure, and in any event, it's more of the 20/20 hindsight I'm criticizing in others who differ with me on this topic.

After all, just because things turned out pretty well in the end doesn't mean that they could have turned out a lot better, or turned better sooner, with a different course of action.  Of course they could have turned out worse, but if you acknowledge that possibility, you have to admit to the other.

As for the rest of Reaper's email; find a time I said something good about a politician of any party? I'm an independent, but I'm far more likely to vote Democrat than Republican.  It's not that I think the Democratic platform is universally great; it's more that I dislike most of the Republican one. And in any event, I mostly criticize the people who are now in power and doing things that I dislike, and obviously that's Bush and pals, at the moment.  I wasn't blogging during the Clinton years, so I don't have any track record to point to there, but I'm sure I would have found plenty of things to criticize back then.  I'm one of the people who think the whole never-ending Whitewater investigation (which eventually turned into the whole Monicagate investigation) that found no wrong doing by the Clintons after about five years and tens of millions of dollars spent was a ridiculous waste of time and tax payer money, pushed by a radical cabal of right wing Clinton-haters.

And while I think that the president shouldn't be fooling around with an intern, I realize that most men in power have historically nailed dozens of women besides their wives, and in the days before crusading prosecutors and tabloid coverage, they got away with it.  And it didn't seem to affect their ability to perform all that much.  Perform their jobs, I mean.  I see that sort of thing as more of a personal issue between the man and his wife/family, and not much of a public one unless he campaigned on some sort of morality ticket, in which case he should be torn down for his hypocrisy.

I'm not adverse to criticizing someone just because I sort of support their political and life goals; my history of self-loathing should at least vouch for that.

As for good things Republicans do, um... I'm hard pressed to find any.  Individual Republicans can be fine people, but on a national level, I tend to disagree with the vast majority of their platform.

I'm for gay rights, reproductive rights, separation of church and state, treatment instead of incarceration for most non-violent and drug crimes, lower (and smarter) military spending, smarter space exploration, more science funding, government setting strict pollution controls and environmental regulations, more and smarter school funding, more college education scholarships, ending corporate welfare and tax dodges, and lots of other things I can't think of right this second.

As far as I know, the national Republican Party goals are in direct opposition to me on everything in my quick list, with the possible exception of "smarter space exploration."  About the only thing I can think of that I agree with a prominent Republican on is John McCain, who has done great work on campaign finance reform, though his real goals of making it impossible for rich corporate and individual donors to continue buying great political clout through campaign contributions has always been stymied, largely by various fat cats his own party.

Look at the $200m Bush raised to spend during the primaries, far more than the federal limit for matching funds.  If he'd stopped at $50m (or so, I don't know the exact figure) he'd have gotten that much in matching funds under federal election rules, and had $100m to spend.  Instead he just kept fundraising on his own, and racked up $200m, all of which he must spend during the primaries, when he's campaigning against no one but his own record.  Then after the primaries he's sticking to the actual limit for matching funds, which is something like $87m, probably since people knowing he had such a vast fortune from business and rich donors would have been a great topic to seize upon for his opponent.

So McCain is valiant and I love his spirit, but he's doomed. It's not a surprise that he's been repeatedly rumored to be considering jumping to the Democratic party, with the radical right taking over the Republicans. Take his pet issue; do you think Bush or his friends have any interest in allowing strict campaign spending laws and donation limits to come into existence?  They've got the rich people and business lining up to give them money; of course they want to keep their financial edge and shout out their poorer opponents. I would too if I were in their shoes; all's fair in love and politics.

But since I'm not in their shoes, I'm free to say that it sickens me.

I'd be perfectly fine with legislation requiring the TV networks to provide 1 free minute per hour to each legitimate candidate (however that would be determined) during the run up to the election, and forbidding them to sell any political ads of any type during the same time.  It's probably unconstitutional and anti-free speech, but it would certainly make TV more fun to watch (not that the other commercials are any better) and provide a level playing field for the candidates, as well as eliminating much of the legalized bribery of campaign donations.

Obviously just the TV commercials thing wouldn't be enough; we'd need similar laws for newspapers, magazines, radio, etc, as well as far stricter limits on total campaign donations.  Plus lots of new laws and investigators to ferret out the ways bribery would slink to if they couldn't do it openly via campaign donations.  I never said it would be easy, but if the long term result was that we actually had some politicians who wanted to do good for the country, rather than just the rich businesses, unions, and causes whose money got them elected, it would certainly be worth it.

Just like the Reagan's budget deficits we're still struggling to crawl out from underneath were worth the fall of the USSR.

Oh wait...

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