Thank You, President Reagan!

Without you, there would be no Donald Trump!

PRESIDENT REAGAN AT HIS DESK BACK WHEN AMERICA WAS APPARENTLY GREAT ENOUGH TO GIVE RISE TO DONALD TRUMP. (PUBLIC DOMAIN PHOTOGRAPH BY CAROL M. HIGHSMITH IN THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

It’s difficult to understand what the world was like prior to the contributions the Ronald Reagan Presidency gave to America. It’s probably too much to hope for, but maybe this is the America Donald Trump refers to when rallying MAGA.

In the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress came together to make important changes to life in these United States. Leaders of both parties cooperated in a “War on Poverty” and passed all sorts of cockamamie initiatives including:

• Federal aid to education

• Fair Housing Legislation,

• Antipoverty laws

• Rural development aid

• Medicare and Medicaid

They even went so far as to get together and pass a Voting Rights Act which would protect minority voting, particularly in the South which had notoriously denied blacks basic rights to cast ballots.

Women didn't have the right to have a credit card in their own name until the 1970s. And the concept of protection over women’s reproductive rights was unthought of until the 60s. But, by the 1970s, support for liberal abortion laws reached its peak. Republicans revealed data that the majority of Americans including Catholics and even the Southern Baptist Convention of 1971 took the position that life began at birth.

With wide bi-partisan support in 1973, Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackman wrote a decision under the court’s leadership of Warren Burger, legalizing abortion across the country. The Roe v. Wade decision became the law of the land.

Both were staunch Republicans.

And, as time went by and to wide applause by evangelicals, America elected a true follower of the teachings of Jesus Christ by sending a Georgia peanut farmer to the White House in 1977, Democrat Jimmy Carter. What they didn’t expect is that he not only believed in the teachings of Jesus Christ … he lived them every day.

Carter took U.S. foreign policy to a whole new level. He focussed on human rights, made conciliatory overtures to China, and agreed to limit nuclear arms with the Soviet Union.

A REAL “Peace in Our Time” that could make David Lloyd George rise from the dead.

What more could you ask for?

But by 1981, the question was answered as Republicans, disappointed that someone so devoted to Christ would actually follow lessons from the Sermon on the Mount, they sought out an actor who could play the part of President of the United States without the frivolity of morality.

Shame, shame, shame.

Realizing that all of this Godliness was ruining their vision of America, they gave the country Ronald Reagan as our 40th President. A man who vowed from his first moment in office that he only bowed to one special interest … “We the people”.

But apparently, he meant only rich people.

Reagan slashed $47,000,000,000 … that's forty-seven billion, from the budget. And to do so took out the carving knife and carefully filleted spending. The Reagan years would see:

Huge cuts in funding for food stamps.

Devasting reductions in aid to education.

Elimination of much funding for job training.

Slashing benefits for the unemployed.

And then he proposed what came to be termed “Trickle Down Economics”. Reduce taxes on the rich and they’ll produce a better standard of living for the peasants.

Reagan’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, David Stockman, ran the numbers that would result from cutting 23 percent off individual tax rates, virtually eliminating capital gains and estate taxes, cutting the top tax rate from 70% to 50%, then down to 28%, and finally lowering the corporate rate from 48% to 34%.

What he found was a disaster. So, in an effort to stave off the pending financial catastrophe, he got Congress to raise the tax rate for the lowest income bracket from 11% to 15%.

When that didn’t work enough he just re-programmed the computers.

But, no matter how it looked to the economists, by the time the Reagan years were over, the national debt had tripled from $994 billion to $2.8 trillion.

No wonder the top 1 percent now has 99% of the nation's wealth.

Unfortunately, news traveled fast, and the antiquated system of news broadcasting turned against them by actually reporting the truth.

You remember when newscasters reported the truth, don’t you? You know, TRUTH, something that has become a novelty in today’s world.

In the pre-pre-pre-Reagan days, starting in the 1920s, the government mandated that the broadcast media had to present information that was first honest, and second, actually balanced both points of view. It was something called the “fairness doctrine”.

Under pressure from Reagan’s Oval Office, the FCC ended the policy.

It would be Reagan’s greatest legacy, giving rise to Rush Limbaugh, FOX News, and modern-day misinformation that would make Joseph Goebbels blush.

Once again the nation could ask the question “What more could we ask for?”

The answer is a country where Donald Trump can pass on his vitriolic rhetoric without hindrance, lower political dialogue to the sewer, and attempt to overthrow the government without penalty.

Thank you, Ronald. Even Jimmy Carter’s God can't help us now.