President Gas

@jimesh Greatest president of the 20th century. You're obviously an idiotic leftist nothing, who's been inculcated by neo-Marxist windbags. Numbers don't lie. Failed leftists do.

Well said, sage. Spoken like a true sociopath.

@sage113409 True, numbers don't lie. And so many numbers did change dramatically under Reagan, and they're all nicely documented and easy to look up. The federal deficit, the personal bankruptcy rate, the number of administration officials indicted while in office, the percentage of personal income spent on health care.<br /> <br /> Unfortunately, they all changed in the wrong direction. And numbers don't lie.<br /> <br /> I can take conservatives like Buckley who argue that spending America into near-bankruptcy was the only way to force the Soviets to actually spend themselves into bankruptcy, freeing half the world from tyranny, because at least they're arguing from the actual facts.<br /> <br /> People like you who choose to believe in obvious lies, or just avoid ever looking at the facts, just so they don't have to change their team, you're not at all conservative. You don't have any ideology at all, because you don't need one. Which is exactly what President Gas is hoping for.

@Flagfalcotronon @bekkaz As usual, political failures don't have arguments to back them up. Yes, the numbers are quite clear. Federal spending is a red herring that people like you only pretend to care about, to ape cable news talking points. As a percentage of GDP, federal expenditures grew barely from 21.6 percent in 1980 to 21.8 percent over the decade. Voters vote with their wallets, and we saw what happened in 1984. The US citizen had not done so well since Eisenhower. <br /> <br /> Conservative paper, the New York Times wrote: "we do know from official economic statistics that the seven year period from 1982 to 1989 was the greatest, consistent burst of economic activity ever seen in the U.S. In fact, it was the greatest economic expansion the world has ever seen - in any country, at any time.<br /> <br /> ....From November 1982, when President Ronald Reagan's new economic program was beginning to take effect, to November 1989, 18.7 million new jobs were created. It was a world record: Never before had so many jobs been created during a comparable time period. The new jobs covered the entire spectrum of work, and more than half of them paid more than $20,000 a year. As total employment grew to 119.5 million, the rate of unemployment fell to slightly over 5 percent, the lowest level in 15 years. Creation of wealth.<br /> <br /> The amount of wealth produced during this seven year period was stupendous - some $30 trillion worth of goods and services. Again, it was a world record. Never before had so much wealth been produced during a comparable period."<br /> <br /> The economic boom under Reagan lasted 92 months without a recession, from November 1982 to July 1990, the longest period of sustained growth during peacetime and the second-longest period of sustained growth in U.S. history. "The growth in the economy lasted more than twice as long as the average period of expansions since World War II."<br /> <br /> From 1973 to 1982, it averaged only 1.6 percent. The Reagan economic boom restored the more usual growth rate as the economy averaged 3.5 percent in real growth from the beginning of 1983 to the end of 1990. His tax reforms created prosperity that continued well into the '90s and '00s. <br /> <br /> So, while you have emotional bleating, you don't have numbers to back you up. You screech like a banshee, because you're ideologically driven, and you cling to whatever phony argument you think can convince other people as dumb as you are. Just admit it. I've debated this too many times for someone as lame as you to attempt to refute me. It doesn't work. Revisionism is attempted by those who can't stand the fact that Reagan largely discredited their economic theories and relegated them to the dustbin of history. You're pathetic.

@falcotron "the percentage of personal income spent on health care" Lol. You just exposed yourself as not only duplicitous, but a blind ideologue. Your wish is to expand oligarchical bureaucracy, no matter what, and limit individual economic independence, including health. It's a perverse savior complex that amoral wish to live out, while claiming care for the disadvantaged. Yet when someone actually lifts record numbers of people out of economic doldrums, you truly hate it, because it makes those people less dependent on sociopathic oligarchs. That's your only end. Expansion of power for those who see themselves as cosmically ordained to engineer society -- for no other reason than their impervious sense of moral superiority, based on things like expressed rage on lyric pages. You're obviously not a serious thinker, so please don't bother me again about things beyond your grasp on '80s lyric pages. Dismissed.

*people