Americans would be utterly baffled as to why so many boomer Brits will see that (originally Carter and Reagan, now changed) headline and automatically think of George and Jack (rather than Jimmy and Ronald) before they click on the link.
Not a boomer but I take it that's a Sweeney reference?
I don't really remember the show but it brings to mind people drinking scotch out tea mugs and shouting "who's the slag what done the blag?" at some poor "snout".
In fact, inflation was pretty bad under Nixon (5.8%) and Ford (11.05%) with some up and down. Nixon even instituted price controls in 1970. Carter inherited that economy. He didn't fix it (well, arguably his Fed Chair Paul Volcker did) but he inherited it.
Carter and Reagan were polar opposites. Carter was a fiscal conservative and Reagan was a spendthrift. Reagan was when the deficit floodgates opened. We've repeated this fiscally conservative Democrat followed by spendthrift Republican ever since.
Carter $70B deficit
Reagan $175B
Bush $350B
Clinton $0B
Bush $1.4T
Obama $600B
Those numbers don't really tell the whole truth; federal spending has increased almost monotonically, and the changes in deficit mostly indicate phases of the business cycle when they left. See this chart:https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/04/what-does-t...
Clinton for example, left at the peak of the DotCom bubble, and was bouyed by capital gains tax revenue, whereas Bush left during the Great Recession.
Reagan cut taxes (supply side). Clinton increased taxes and cut Cold War era defense spending in his 1993 budget proposal. W didn't even put the Afghanistan and Iraq wars on normal budgeting. That emergency spending went straight to debt. When Obama reversed this accounting trick, he was accused of increasing the deficit. Yes, everything is more complicated.
Obama inherited W's Great Recession with its 10% unemployment and its cratered tax revenues. This is similar to FDR inheriting Hoover's Great Depression. Obama spent his 8 years digging out of that hole. His one initiative was the ACA which is still intact even after the Republicans had all three branches of government and is quite popular.
Moreover, just as Afghanistan and Iraq were disastrous wars of choice, W's tax cuts, Medicare Part D and his zero down payment home loan programs were the direct cause of that recession.
Obama wasted money on programs like cash for clunkers, failed climate scandals like Solyndra, and engaged in similar "nation-building" as W by sacking the dictator of Libya, which partly led to the rise of ISIS in his second term. It was a complete mess for the middle east and Europe and cost countless lives. Obama and W. were cut from the same cloth and listened to the same bureaucratic Pentagon consensus. There was virtually no difference between the two. That's why they are such good friends, by the way.
Afghanistan and Iraq were disasters and Obama had 8 years to end them but never did.
Cash For Clunkers was a brilliant idea given the economy, the one in free fall that W left Obama. BTW, it was overwhelming opposed by Republicans. That's because McConnell wanted Obama to be a one term president.
Everyone wanted Gadaffi gone, even Putin. Hence the UN resolutions. It was funny that Gingrich was calling for intervention ... until the next day.
Complaining that W and Obama are on good terms? Wow.
Clinton's tax increase cost the Democrats the House in 1994.
Obama clearly did increase the deficit as national debt went from $10T to $19.5T during his tenure. In other words, the debt increased by nearly as much as every president prior to Obama. Of course, we seem to find ourselves on an irreversible debt slope that is
rapidly accelerating and I suspect that every future administration will outspend the one prior.
Yes, Clinton's budget, his tax increases and defense spending cuts, they did cost the Democrats the House. Gingrich voted against that budget, then campaigned against it, winning the Speakership, then shut the government down over it, twice, and then after it turned a profit, tried/tries to take credit for it.
Obama didn't increase that debt by spending. He did it by inheriting Bush's Great Recession with its sky high unemployment and lack of tax revenues. He managed to decrease the deficit each year until his last. Obama's singular spending initiative, the ACA or Obamacare, is dirt cheap compared to the $6T of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And then there's Medicare Part D.
BTW, the ACA cost the Democrats the House as well. Some things are worth fighting for.
> Clinton for example, left at the peak of the DotCom bubble, and was bouyed by capital gains tax revenue, whereas Bush left during the Great Recession.
Deficit increases under these presidents isn't as much on the business cycle as you indicate. For example, Clinton enjoyed higher capital gains tax revenue, but he also signed legislation to increase taxes (which obviously impact the deficit). Conversely, Bush chose not to include substantial additional revenue in his recession-era emergency spending plans. Both were policy choices that entirely support the OP's point.
In fact, although Trump and Biden were not included in the list, they are following the same schema. Trump cut tax revenue and then didn't offset massive deficit spending on his way out the door. Biden's signature economic plan is stalled in part because he is making efforts at offsetting spending with increased revenue.
Simply looking solely at the deficit doesn't prove one was a spendthrift. If you cut or fail to raise taxes enough, a huge deficit can occur without actually spending more than the previous administration. In fact, it is possible to have a huge deficit while spending less than the previous administration.
In Jimmy Carter's four years, the Federal Government's spending increased by almost 48%. In Ronald Reagans eight years, Federal Government spending increased only 53%.
No, you aren't accounting for inflation. In constant 2012 dollars, US spending was $2T in 1977 and $2.2T in 1980. It was $3T in 1988. It was $3.5T in 1992.
It’s not obvious to me that it’s right to inflation adjust the numbers here, since one of the main arguments people make against large government spending is that they think it causes inflation.
Do you really believe that when were are looking at the effects of deficit spending (such as inflation, debt, growth) the absolute number of dollars in the deficit is more important than an inflation or gdp adjusted number?
Imagine we passed a law that only made one tenth of currency still viable, and reduced the size of all owed debts and contacts denominated in dollars by 10x.
Effectively making the dollar 10x more valuable. This would cut our absolute deficit spending by 10x. Would this then let us increase inflation adjusted government spending by 10x without suffering any ill effects from deficit spending? The obvious answer to that is no, which then implies inflation or gdp adjusted deficit spending is a far more important metric.
Inflation in the 70s preceded Carter. There was the oil crisis. It preceded that. Nixon ordered price controls ... in 1970.
No, 70s inflation had nothing to do with Carter's 'spending'. Carter's spending as a percentage of the GDP decreased from 1977 (19.65%) to 1979 (19.18%). It increased in 1980.
In no real universe was Carter anything but a fiscal conservative. In no real universe were Reagan and Bush anything but profligate.
Yep, the spending on the Viet Nam war and the deficits it created were a big cause of the inflation during the Nixon/Ford years. Carter pushed for a balanced budget which angered enough folks in his party to lead to Ted Kennedy primarying him from the Left in 1980.
Clinton's "surplus" is a myth. The national debt increased every year that Clinton was in office and the tax revenue generated by his policies never exceeded government spending, which would be required in order to legitimately claim a surplus.
If you look at the numbers, the Clinton "surplus" was merely some fancy accounting achieved by borrowing money from government trust funds, like social security.
> If you look at the numbers, the Clinton "surplus" was merely some fancy accounting achieved by borrowing money from government trust funds, like social security.
What numbers? Care to cite them?
Social Security has always held its surplus in t-bonds. Ergo, the government has always "borrowed" from SS. So I'm having trouble seeing how it was magically different under Clinton. And also why republican presidents don't use the same "fancy accounting" to make their deficits look lower.
You're confused: the annual "deficit" and the total "national debt" are two different things. The deficit is the difference between income and spending in a fixed time period. The national debt is the cumulative amount owed.
A balanced budget (i.e., zero deficit) or even a large but insufficient surplus doesn't stop the national debt growing. It's like a credit card. Even if every month you pay off what you spent the previous month (balanced budget), the interest keeps compounding on the principal you owe and your total debt keeps growing. Unless the government makes a serious effort at paying off the interest and paying down the principal, the national debt will keep growing. (Of course, the principal plus interest becomes the new principal on each compounding cycle, so the principal is a moving target.)
I am not confusing the deficit nor the national debt. I simply mentioned both. I addressed the deficit in my original comment. I'll do so again for the sake of convenience: Clinton's tax revenue was never enough to cover all government spending. In every year that Clinton claimed to have a surplus, government spending increased by a bigger amount than the claimed surplus. In other words, Clinton borrowed from other areas of government (social security, etc.) to fill the gap between tax revenues and government spending. Here are both the national debt and the deficit for the Clinton years:
Since you brought up a credit card example, what Clinton basically did was pay down his Visa using his MasterCard. We are still paying off his MasterCard.
Congress controls the budget, not the POTUS. Republicans controlled the senate, and Democrats controlled the house his first term, Democrats controlled both chambers his second term.
No, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 1 has nothing to do with the budget. It has to do with paying debts and collecting taxes.
Article 1 Section 9 Clause 7 is closer. It says Congress has to pass an appropriation before spending money. That’s still not budgeting.
The 1921 Budget and Accounting Act says that the President has to submit a budget proposal. Congress modifies and passes it. The President signs that or there’s a continuing resolution.
No, Congress doesn’t control the budget, either Constitutionally or procedurally. The President proposes one and generally gets most of what they want.
In fact, Congress doesn’t even pass a budget. The President proposes a budget, required by law, and Congress passes appropriations bills, required by the Constitution.
Whenever I hear about the end of the cold war, I think the Polish contribution to the fall of the USSR is mostly unknown, under appreciated and under valued.
Also obviously with the end of the cold war, what most of this articles miss, the US lost Europe. Before e.g. Germanys establishment pushed US nuclear weapons ("Jump!" "How high?") into Germany against a large part of it's polutation, after 1990 no country in Europe jumps anymore when the US says "Jump!", because the Soviet scare is gone.
From my perspective we are only at the beginning of a period where Europe doesn't jump for US.
Through NATO they follow us along into dubious, pointless, dangerous US conflicts, sparing the US President from asking Congress for authorization, while bearing the brunt of extraterritorial attacks since there arent two gigantic oceans separating them from the conflict.
The US uses almost countless Europe located bases for missile shields against Russia and to many hawkish people the cold war is still going on as if it was the 80s still.
Europe still depends on Russia for energy so this symbiosis is seen as important.
But I think this changes because the UK was the only EU member state vetoing an EU military, and with them gone the EU can arm itself. Dismantling a lot of the need for the US, we can mostly assume it will be to keep out Russia and lessen the burden of NATO but there are a lot of values that differ if we are being honest.
The complete list of countries known to have nuclear weapons worldwide is The United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. Now that the UK is no longer in the EU, France is it.
To "have" nuclear weapons in your context likely means "controls". Meaning, some of those countries store part of their nuclear weapons in other countries that are not on your list.
Correct. My country, The Netherlands, is hosting US nukes (not officially but its a public secret). Officially, we don't have nukes, nor do we host them.
France offered nuclear weapons to Germany several times (mostly to share costs), Germany declined. Personally I think as Germans we need nuclear weapons, but the huge majority of Germans are against having them.
> From my perspective we are only at the beginning of a period where Europe doesn't jump for US.
As a European, I tend to agree with that assessment, particularly with countries like Germany.
Most of the US military presence might be gone compared to cold war levels, but the pro-US political presence mostly remains the same.
Which is actually quite astounding considering we are slowly entering the second decade of when this distancing started [0] and it had plenty of additional contributions since then [1].
My experience from growing up in the 70s and 80s in Germany: I saw dozens of warplanes every day simulating low level penetrations, I don't see any today. I quite often saw US military in the forrests, US tanks on the streets, haven't seen one in decades. The US was such a topic, that there were many Anti-US demonstrations, there were attacks on US installations - none today.
Public political discussion always considered the US, because of the scare of the Soviet Union, which was daily present (how many millions of kids in the 80s in Europe feared nuclear war?).
But already in 1990 when I was in the military the attitude had changed a lot.
To this day you can live in a small Bavarian town, and have the US army keep you awake late into the night with training exercises that involve plenty of shooting, as it's, for example, the case for the people living near Grafenwöhr.
To this day it's completely legal for the NSA to operate in Germany and spy on literally anybody [0]
Neither do I see the attitude change on a grander political level in Germany. Most of the German political landscape is still plenty happy displaying a double-moral that's would transplant neatly right back into the cold war [1]
One of the weirder examples: Persecuting alleged Syrian torturers for crimes against humanity committed in Syria [2].
While crimes against humanity committed by the US, trough German territory, are apparently not in the jurisdiction of German courts [3].
That's not what a "neutral" Germany looks and acts like, that's what a Germany looks and acts like that was for decades groomed to be a US vassal.
Whenever I hear about the end of the cold war, I think the Polish contribution to the fall of the USSR is mostly unknown, under appreciated and under valued.
One of the most fascinating theories that I've read on this is that this was the result of a secret alliance between Reagan's CIA and the Catholic Church. The basic outlines of the alliance was that the CIA supplied money and material on non-violent resistance (through deniable channels), the Catholic Church supplied the network and connections that could distribute them. Also the two aligned on other things, such as tying US foreign aid to abortion policies that the Catholic Church liked.
What does Poland have to do with all of this? Pope John Paul II was Polish, and so their test became the Solidarity movement in Poland. After that proved a success, they replicated it throughout the Eastern Block.
I first read this theory in a Mother Jones article back in the 1980s. And every so often I wish I could find it to read it again.
From a local perspective, I can tell you that Catholicism played a huge role in pulling down Communism in Poland, but next to no role in neighboring Czechoslovakia, where the Czech part of the country is rather irreligious and distrustful towards organized churches.
In particular, when the Polish government asked Gorbachev for for help in putting down Solidarity, thinking they'd get a Soviet tank brigade like HUngary in 1956, Gorbachev said nyet, and Soviet control of the Eastern bloc unzipped pretty quick.
The disastrous response to Chernobyl also gave a boost to independence movements in Ukraine and the Baltics. Gorbachev has always been in denial about how his policies helped hasten the collapse.
> In particular, when the Polish government asked Gorbachev for for help in putting down Solidarity, thinking they'd get a Soviet tank brigade like HUngary in 1956, Gorbachev said nyet, and Soviet control of the Eastern bloc unzipped pretty quick.
The timeline does not work on this. Gorbachev was in power only from 1985, while Solidarity got thwarted in 1981, during introduction of Marital Law (key leaders got arrested, the strikes and protests were broken down, sometimes using lethal force). The Polish communist party justified these harsh measures with exactly the argument that it's still better than a foreign (Soviet) invasion of their country.
Yes, I've had to explain the bit about Volcker to a few people over the years. People older than me that should know better.
Another fascinating chapter from that era, if you're interested in the revolution in Iran and resulting US election, is covered in the book "October Surprise," by Gary Sick. While the author states soberly that we don't have all the details, those we do point in an unfortunate direction. That many in the Reagan admin would be behind bars and implicated with the Iran arms scandal less than a decade later has also largely been forgotten. The two events are thought to be unconnected.
At the time Reagan often said he "didn't recall…" Back then I thought he was omitting the truth, but then we found he had Alzheimer's a few years later, and turned out it was probably true he didn't remember a thing. Can't make this stuff up, folks.
There was also a good Frontline episode on the subject, but I've not been able to find it due to PBS' shenanigans. Maybe they lost the tape.
You kind of can make this stuff up. Reagan's in-office Alzheimers is the same kind of narrative Noah Smith is talking about, more talked about than empirically supported. Reagan was first diagnosed in 1993, long after leaving office; his White House physicians all attest to no evident decline. The closest we get to a serious report is Leslie Stahl claiming that he was vacant during an interview... but who knows what that means? I was vacant last Tuesday after not sleeping the night before.
The topic of Reagan's decline in office is debated, but we should be wary of premising conclusions on it. Reagan was probably fully competent while serving as President.
The events in question started in ~1980, so he was likely fine at the time. But not able to talk about them coherently a ~decade later. From memory (which could be failing) he didn't try any politician-esque evasion of questions or make excuses or even outright lie. He merely repeated, "I don't recall," several times in row. Not a common strategy at that level.
Note that Reagan had been shot and had surgery, so nobody's surprised he didn't fully recover at his age.
Biden however has been reported as declining mentally since 2012, yet his family and the Democratic Party knowingly propped him up as a Presidential candidate. And here we are.
I can't reply, but anyone downvoting the sibling comment about Biden needs to do their own research rather than downvote reflexively. It's perfectly fine to think he was better than the alternative, but it's pretty silly to look at the evidence and conclude that Biden is perfectly mentally OK.
Remember when discussing Biden's mental health was a right wing conspiracy theory that would get you banned from social media? Well, this is the result when we're not allowed to vet our elected officials.
So we only discuss Carter and Reagan's economics but all else is out of scope? I mean, the above is the essence of conversation, one thing brings up anther that would appear to have relevance. One speaks of Reagan's mental acuity or lack of it, so it brings up the possibility we are experiencing the same in the current president. I'm almost certain if Trump were back in power and he spoke like that, the 25th would likely be brought up.
Correct: we are literally talking about Ronald Reagan and misconceptions about his term of office, and your opinions on current events are (1) not relevant to that discussion and (2) super likely to take the thread off in a bad direction.
It's for this exact reason that r/AskHistorians has a time limit on how recent events can be before they're discussed there. We're not working under the letter of r/AskHistorians, but we definitely are working to its spirit.
That's not how HN discussions go. For example, 50% of all discussions end up turning to people complaining about global warming. Pretty much 100% of all discussions about anything that any tech company does veer off into general condemnations of capitalism and "big tech".
I mean, I admire the idea of message discipline, but it seems strange to enforce this rule so selectively.
The wording of moderation comments varies over time, and plenty of moderation doesn't come with comments, so you can't draw such conclusions. If you want more examples, try these:
More importantly to me, they offered nothing substantive, nothing new, just an unsupported claim that we've heard endlessly in the past. Though if repeating unsupported claims was substantive, it would be very different.;)
EDIT: In way, it is appropriate for a discussion on how false narratives are formed.
I didn't notice anything at the time. But after watching my father slowly decline from Alzheimers, and then going back and looking at Reagan's conferences, I can see it in the latter part of his presidency. It's the look of panic when he's lost his grip on what's happening around him.
Thanks. I had heard about sleep (for that purpose and many others). For decades, I got a full night maybe once every 10 days. Now it seems a bit absurd to sleep less than a full night. I'll look at the book.
People trained to diagnose Alzheimers had the task of assessing Reagan, regularly, and found no such clear evidence. I don't doubt the intuition you have about matching behavior to Alzheimers is well-earned, but we should be very cautious about operationalizing it generally. "Reagan was impaired by dementia in office" is a live debate, and the "no" side of that debate currently seems to have the stronger argument.
(I have no particular admiration for Reagan, and found the rehabilitation of Carter in this post pretty compelling; I'm not here to stick up for Reagan, but rather just to point out a curious echo of the theme of the post in this thread).
I understand I'm not a trained professional, but being around people with AZ is something you can't get out of books.
An admittedly second hand data point - a friend of mine in the 90's worked with AZ nurses who'd just look at him and say "he's got AZ".
Thirdly, there's a long history of physicians examining presidents and publicly minimizing any health issues. This is for good reason, you don't want to let on to America's enemies that the president is not in good form.
Lastly, AZ is a decades long process. By the time it is diagnosed, the symptoms have been there for at least a decade, unrecognized. After my father was diagnosed, looking back on things, I realized it had been happening for a long time.
Also, skits like this one by SNL made in 1986 (copied from elsewhere) wouldn't have been made unless people were already noticing a disconnect... even if they didn't know the exact cause:
My history professor also made passing mention to Carter's loss largely being due to the Iran hostage crisis, which "magically" resolved when Reagan was inaugurated.
Yes, and until looking into the subject I didn't realize how close it came. Wikipedia says it took only minutes, but definitely later on inauguration day. They just didn't bother back then I guess. Cable news didn't yet exist.
I remember watching the inauguration on TV in my junior high auditorium and they interrupted the inauguration coverage to announce the release of the hostages.
He's partly right. Stagflation was another issue. Also Reagan was a natural actor, brainless but telegenic.
The United States (Dulles) overthrew the democratically elected Mossadegh in 1953 and installed the Shah. Then Eisenhower, JFK, Nixon, Ford and yes Carter completely supported the Shah. The Iranian revolutionaries held that against us and in particular, against the then president, Jimmy Carter. Given what we did to them, they had a point.
The resulting hostage crisis was the smallest humiliation the US ever suffered. Compare that to Saddam sending an Exocet into the Stark or Israel strafing the Liberty.
Reagan made much of this crisis during the election, and the hostages were released on inauguration day. Then Reagan supported Iraq in their invasion of Iran AND also sold missiles to Iran. A strange foreign policy, mostly beholden to whatever Saudi Arabia and Israel wanted on a given day.
Also, he probably would have won _if_ his rescue effort hadn't been such a boondoggle and failure. It's like they didn't rehearse the situation beforehand and winged it (no pun intended).
>if you're interested in the revolution in Iran and resulting US election, is covered in the book "October Surprise,"
As one can see, conspiracy theories are not a new invention. This particular one has been investigated and debunked over and over (wiki has a decent overview for once).
There's nothing to debunk since the smoking gun was never found. However numerous second-order effects like the Iran–Contra deal are well documented and were prosecuted. No reason to believe the contacts started there out of the blue.
It's obvious a sitting US admin has ways to talk to other countries. There's a long distance from that to "they must have had dealings with Iran before they got elected", a long distance which required some evidence - which as you say doesn't exist.
Many important people are on the record maintaining it happened and there is a decent amount of circumstantial evidence. Meetings in foreign countries, etc.
There's also lots of documentation about the Reagan campaign's "counter october-surprise" activities. They were very active and making ties all over. It was a big deal in 1980 on the news every single night. Could and did make/break the election. The administration had the highest number of people put behind bars or on their way before being pardoned. They played dirty and everyone knows it.
These parts aren't under dispute either.
A few years later the same people are all caught in a number of treasonous dealings, with... the other same exact people.
(Not to mention: Name any mainstream Americans who'd think to sell arms to Iran in the 80s? It borders on the ridiculous. Very few folks would even contemplate the idea, much less execute. Narrowed suspects with high motivation.)
Where there's smoke, there's fire, unless you refuse to smell it.
The issue has been investigated over and over, and nobody found any actual evidence thereof. Iran would have had all motivation to threaten to expose Reagan - yet US policy remained mostly pro-Iraq.
When push comes to shove, you have a few unimportant Americans which consider any publication to be evidence, and Banisadr, which was an loony exile by that time (actually he was more than a bit loony beforehand).
I also recall the hearings were far more incensed with the idea of funding the Contras (ignoring the Congressional ban) than with Iran arms which was considered merely a cynical play to serve US interests.
e.g. the Chase Bank memoir, despite the publication being if anything an argument against, since the Reagan campaign wouldn't have to spread rumors if they had a deal.
I can never remember whether Reagan single handedly won the Cold War on horseback with a six shooter or if he was functionally incapacitated and thus not responsible for anything.
Even my mother, a product of an FDR world, who threw shoes at Reagan on TV could not stop laughing about how over the top it was.
I credit Nancy. She saw the ideologues he put in during the first term where driving for a cliff and brought Baker, Deaver and Schultz in to right the ship. It helped to have someone like Tip O’Neil in the House who thought impeaching over Iran Contra would be bad for the country.
Reagan, like W Bush wasn’t incompetent, he was just incurious and easily led the farther he went up. Look at Reagan’s 1964 speeches and W’s Governor debates and it’s like they both fell of a skateboard and cracked their heads open once they ran for President.
I grew up deep in Reagan's America in the 1980's and it was a paranoid, wretched time and place to be a child. The absolute worst thing about the Trump years is they reminded me of growing up in Billings, Montana.
Trump has nothing as far as destruction of this country compared to Reagan. You want to trace the end of the American Empire -- put that blame on Reagan and his acolytes first.
I grew up in the 70s and 80s, and can certainly complain about a lot of things about that time.
In your mind, what are the top few most wretched aspects of that time? I grew up in south central Los Angeles, and so gang and drug crime would be the top of my list.
I grew up in an ultra-conservative church called the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, that uses techniques like this: https://www.lutheranforum.com/blog/mobbing-systemic-spiritua... to enforce it's very narrow, literal interpretation of the bible. Yes, of course they are physically and sexually abusive, and they use mobbing techniques against 5-11 year olds. Of course they idolized Reagan like a god, also.
I live in LA now and ride the bus through South Central, and I've lived there and I have found that place far more welcoming to me than I ever did back in Montana.
So, YMMV and the grass is always greener. But I'm a lot happier in the poor parts of LA than I ever was in Billings, Montana.
Wow that's rough, sorry you went through that growing up.
South central has enormously improved since the late 70s up through the early 90s. As a kid, I was personally shot up a couple of times from the street. Crack houses were everywhere, and the gangs were pretty terrifying.
I had two guns in my face by the time I left Elementary school, and I remember police officers marching down my block with rifles. People in Montana are armed to the teeth and often times drunk / high on meth. Houses were blowing up because they were meth factories on my block. There were drive bys in the 90's.
The predators in the elementary school are allowed to prey. While I don't want to discount how bad things were in South Central back then, a lot of white people crime is swept under the rug and a lot of crime in ethnically diverse neighborhoods is splashed on front page news.
I grew up in Reagan's America, and I didn't find it paranoid or wretched. I remember a lot of optimism around the space program and the fall of the Berlin wall. There were great movies, great music, shopping malls, arcades, and we were united as a country. I find few, if any parallels, to the Trump years. Trump is the polar opposite of Reagan in terms of communication style IMO.
There was an open and aggressive disdain for anyone different back then. I am autistic as the average HN reader, and my home town was shockingly abusive to me. I tried not thinking about it for 20+ years after leaving that place, but now I look back at that period of my life and reel. The abuse they tolerated back then...
United? Being gay was a lot harder under Reagan and his moral majority, and his wretched politics around AIDS, and the rise of his Christian conservative warriors made any non-normative lifestyle hell.
Every graph on this page comparing the USA and the USSR needs a legend, they are unreadable unless you pick them apart with context from the surrounding paragraphs.
> But it was Jimmy Carter who appointed Volcker as the Fed chair, in 1979. Volcker was appointed specifically to do this job, as he was known as an inflation hawk, and Carter recognized inflation as America’s biggest economic problem. Volcer hiked interest rates all the way up to 17.61% under Carter, causing the first of the two Volcker Recessions in 1980.
The process that Volker's Fed set in motion is with us today. Have a gander at the historical constant-maturity 30-year bond:
Zoom out to the multi-decade view and notice something: a peak in late-1981 and a relentless slide toward zero today. You won't find a multi-decade channel like this in many other places.
These ever-lower long-term yields have played a major role in the housing market bubble that ended in 2008 and the one still inflating today. It could also be argued that this trend toward ever-lower long-term yields has been responsible the increasingly outlandish stock market valuations and the never-ending quest for yield (i.e. risk) that we currently see by institutions, individuals, and foreign governments.
I think it's hardly surprising that the untruths spread by propagandists during election campaigns and by biased pundits don't always line up with observed facts or lived experiences. They don't call them spin doctors for nothing.
The solution is to dig in to statements of truth for yourself until you uncover verifiable facts. This is true as much for assertions in electoral campaign literature as much as claims of grand conspiracies to subvert privileges through widespread intramuscular injections of 5G microchips. Check the references provided, and if there are no references then check your gullibility.
It should also be noted that one can regularly observe people engaging in framing (intentionally or not) those who dissent as doing so only because of propaganda or religion, despite not having knowledge of the true underlying reasons.
This actually points at a central problem with modern democracy. People are expected to think when they vote, but most people do not have the base information required to make decisions. And so everything descends into PR: stereotypes of righties being better with money, lefties being in thrall to unions, and so on.
When it comes time to vote, the PR machines start up and people are made to pretend they are thinking objectively when actually we are about as prepared as we'd be at a wine tasting. The analogy continues, because whatever we decided we think we were well justified later on, regardless of what actually happened.
I'm glad I read this article, it's well presented with sources, and debunks some quite important myths.
I do not think this is a problem with “modern” democracy, but democracy in general. There’s always been organized mechanisms for convincing people to believe certain things and vote a certain way.
I'd say the whole premise behind voting and democracy is not so much the people voting for something they “want”, but rather not voting for something they “object”. The voting process makes sure that the government doesn't go into the direction that most people don't want it to. Aside from that, government can do whatever it wants (popularly referred to as not honoring the election promises).
How so? The chart suggesting Volcker "saved" the US from inflation seems to suggest otherwise. The Fed was already trending towards what the "Volcker Fed" did. The "list of significant deregulations" on Wikipedia is actually listed as "Related legislation". Reagan had a greater number of deregulation legislation listed as directly related to Reagan's administration rather than in the "Related legislation" so there is some game playing going on as far as the significance of each administration.
> This actually points at a central problem with modern democracy
One explanation of why we should prefer democracy that I quite like goes like this:
Democracy is rooted in the belief that more than half the people are right more than half the time
It doesn't have to rely on everyone being smart, or even thinking. It only has to rely on the statistical likelihood that, even with all the errors and noise and lack of thinking and even stupidity that might manifest in any individual, if more than half the voters agree on something, there's a better chance that it's the right choice than the wrong one.
THere are all kinds of holes that can be poked in this approach, and I sometimes do that, but fundamentally I stand by the basic conception that this describes.
What we have instead is identity politics, which is pretty toxic when mixed with democracy. Eventually we'll have to get rid of one or the other, and its not looking good for democracy at this point.
William F. Buckley (there's a name that ought to trigger you) famously said that he'd rather be governed by 2,000 people chosen at random out of the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty.
Carter caused inflation in the 70s? How did that narrative get started given that his predecessor was the one handing out "WIP" (Whip Inflation Now) buttons?
I mean, that's the extent of the "logic" as far as it goes. But enough for votes in the ballot box. The world is too damn complicated. I barely can get my tv to operate, and you're supposed to expect me to understand the ins and outs of federal reserve policy, economics, and climate change?
Mueller's report was damning. But the story it told was so complicated that only obsessed people could keep the details straight, and most of those people were heavily invested in the outcome one way or the other anyway.
Judging from my Dad's trajectory, reconstructed from his accounts of his politics, during his adult life, from the 1960s-present, plus my own observations: talk radio in the 80s did it. 100%. Completely defined his worldview and all his political opinions. That was it. Long before Fox News came along.
Rush & others said such-and-such about Carter. Day. After day. After day. Until he believed it.
Paul Sabin has written recently[0] about Carter's passion for deregulation, and how he balanced it with other legislative goals. The idea that people were "choked by regulation" was not exclusive to the right.
Regarding the cold war and military spending... Everyone in the 80s thought Reagan was nuts because he wanted to build "Star Wars" a system that would shoot down all the Soviet Nukes. So the Soviets wasted money trying to compete with it. So at least in some cases, it wasn't about us spending more on the military... it was about tricking them into spending more.
Was it really a trick? By all accounts, President Reagan was sincerely horrified by the threat of a nuclear war and really did intend to build a working defensive system. But he was clueless about the difficulty of actually building such a system, and then the military industrial complex piled onto the gravy train to get lucrative R&D projects.
There are tons of spelling errors in this article. I feel compelled to criticize something because I hate Noah Smith on a personal level, but am chagrinned to find that I generally agree with most of the arguments that he makes here along with his interpretation of the history. The only thing deficient here was that he could have improved his argument by extending it backwards a bit to the malignant continuity between JFK (you'll really trigger the boomers with that one), LBJ, and Nixon in terms of creating long-term fiscal problems for the US.
To throw a bone to a side that I usually disagree with, Smith could have also productively contrasted that latter century bipartisan fiscal irresponsibility with the relative sobriety of the New Deal just in terms of deficits and long term sustainability. It may seem weird on the face of it given how the New Deal tends to be portrayed in contemporary times by both the left and the right, but FDR might have been the last real fiscal conservative of the 20th century both in terms of rhetoric and policy until Bill Clinton closed out the millennium. Despite what seemed to be bitter acrimony during the Clinton administration, the Reagan-Clinton years were probably the last ones in which there was a productive competitive dynamic between both parties. It was also the last time in my memory that there was serious discussion of entitlement reform: that was really wiped out from public debate after 9/11. Back then, you could credibly argue that the competition between the parties resulted in better policy thinking on both sides. In contemporary times the competition seems more to result in more aggressive stupidity on both sides: they both tend to make each other dumber to own the cons/libs at the expense of the public.
Gives me a bad taste in my mouth to have to say something nice about a Noah Smith article.
Yes, this needs to be debunked. I was in high school during the Carter years and I was into politics (seems odd for someone that age). There's a reason that Carter was primaried by Ted Kennedy in 1980: many Democrats found Carter too fiscally conservative. Carter was a deficit hawk. He pushed for a balanced budget and that upset many Democrats at the time because he wasn't proposing the large social spending increases they wanted to see.
I think Carter is definitely an underrated president who likely would have been re-elected had the Iranian hostage crisis not happened. He was a visionary especially in terms of the environment and global climate change (which his administration began to address). But he was much more of a centrist than a liberal - though the center has moved to the right since his time.
Blowback keeps happening. IIRC, the modern Central American drug gangs were born of US funding and training of anti-Communist forces in the 1980s.
Remember it next time someone says, 'let's send arms to those insurgents!' Obama dialed it back, partly for that reason (AFAIK). Biden apparently has embraced a policy of 'restraint', with the idea that outcomes from US intervention often are counter-productive.
(I don't support it - instead, accept the challenge and find better interventions. Quitting is a bizarre solution IMHO. People still need freedom, and need help.)
I always thought we could do well parachuting in cell phones into these hot spots, and these cell phones get $50 usd or maybe a little more transferred to accounts tied to that number.
Then we could have incentives -- hey, go to this mosque, not that one and we'll pay you $20 more a week.
It would be cheaper than what we do now and would be a lot more effective than dropping bombs on wedding parties.
Very interesting. As you may know, there's research showing that if you just give people cash (or other liquid forms of money), they spend it well and it's highly efficient. It's very interesting to apply that to conflict.
We do sometimes buy off governments, effectively, via foreign aid.
I think you are confusing Jimmy Carter with Three Mile Island. The former favoured renewables over nuclear, but it was the latter that stopped nuclear energy development in its tracks.
Yes Regan lifted it but the damage was done. Say you are a company that is thinking about spending a few billion on a nuclear powerplant, are you going to take the risk when a single person, that possibly might change every 4 years, can decide your fate. This was not good policy.
"Many countries see nuclear power as the only real opportunity, at least
in this century, to reduce the dependence of their economic
well-being on foreign oil-an energy source of uncertain
availability, growing price, and ultimate exhaustion. The
U.S., by contrast, has a major domestic energy source-
coal-but its use is not without penalties, and our plans
also call for the use of nuclear power as a share in our
energy production." Jimmy Carter April 7, 1977
Wouldn't exactly call that "killing off nuclear power" - Three Mile Island and the movie The China Syndrome did that. The movie was released ~2 weeks before the accident on March 28, 1979.
The Iranian situation was a result of his policy, not just some unfortunate event that randomly happened. Brzezinski is directly responsible for the “arc of crisis” foreign policy that sought to intentionally destabilize the Islamic states on the Soviet periphery.
The United States overthrew Mossadegh the democratically elected leader of Iran in 1953. That's where the problems started. Long before Carter's presidency.
This is bad history that robs people of their agency and blames the US as the sole cause of any political event happening anywhere in the world.
First, it was the Clerical class that was most responsible for the overthrow. They were the ones with the organization and the power and the political networks. They then recruited the British to help them, who were the second most important factor. The British had intelligence assets in Iran. The US was basically a bagman, paying off $100,000 to some of the actors on behalf of the British, and for the clerics.
The U.S. simply didn't have a lot of intelligence assets in Iran, nor did it have any troops there, nor did it have a lot of sway over Iran. It was an intermediary between the actors that actually held power. One can argue that the payment of $100,000 - that was the sole contribution of the U.S. to the coup - was what made the difference. I doubt it. Then the US CIA chief played up his role in the coup in an attempt to gain political points.
Yet this complex history is boiled down to "US overthrows democratically elected government". I mean, come on.
But what's useful about such a narrative is that the U.S. (and also the U.S.S.R.) were involved in the politics of basically every country. Even if all they did was throw a dinner at their embassy or promise some foreign aid. So all you need to do is look at whichever side the U.S. was on in some local dispute, and then if that side won, you say "US forces nation to do X".
While I agree about bad, simplified history, how do you distinguish the good from the bad? Why is your narrative more accurate than others? (Would you provide a source for that version?)
I've read narratives attributing it to the US and UK in serious sources, such as (IIRC) Foreign Affairs.
In terms of general rules of thumb, it requires a certain working knowledge of the world to gauge how plausible it is that the U.S. would single-handedly be able to overthrow a regime in Iran if there wasn't broad popular support for the new regime and if the existing regime wasn't already deeply unpopular and if there wasn't already a local coup being plotted. So into this bucket of general knowledge, I would put the following facts, which are easy to verify
- The clerics were the most powerful political group in Iran, and were the best organized. The main enemy of the clerics were the communists.
- The communists were making headways, which made the clerics extremely unhappy
- Mosaddegh was viewed as appeasing the communists, which made the clerics even more unhappy
- Mosaddegh rigged a constitutional election (99% votes to agree) which made him extremely unpopular
- The initial US-Anglo coup efforts actually failed
- The UK had financial interests, assets on the ground, and much more experience with coup plotting than the U.S.
- The US didn't have a lot of assets on the ground or particularly understood Iran very well, given that this was shortly after WW2 and they were just starting their world-policing role -- rather incompetently.
So that would be the starting point for skepticism about the importance of the U.S. role, which just comes from background knowledge.
Note I am not saying the U.S. was not involved in making payments. It was. I am saying that that was a secondary role.
Now, onto specific data. It is based on the following observations:
Whereas US FRUS data attributes a huge role for the U.S., British data does not. And the British were much more involved in Iran. So how can that be? Well, the theory is the US CIA station chief exaggerated his role, and then this went into FRUS and right into the eager hands of all the Chomsky readers out there who want to view every nation as without agency, without internal political forces, but merely as puppets of the U.S. which can snap it's fingers and force regime change wherever and whenever it wants.
Here is a link to an article covering some recently declassified British data:
"In recent years, new interpretations of the coup have called into question the accuracy of various U.S. archival records and first-person accounts, discounting the importance of the CIA and British intelligence role in the operation and casting doubt on any connection between Iranian clerics and the Western powers. The principal aim of the latter contention is to bolster the case that Iranians, including leading mullahs, acted essentially (if not entirely) on their own in bringing about Mosaddeq’s ouster."[1]
Here is more data from Foreign Affairs[2]:
"Yet there was a supreme irony to Obama’s concession. The history of the U.S. role in Iran’s 1953 coup may be “well known,” as the president declared in his speech, but it is not well founded. On the contrary, it rests heavily on two related myths: that machinations by the CIA were the most important factor in Mosaddeq’s downfall and that Iran’s brief democratic interlude was spoiled primarily by American and British meddling. For decades, historians, journalists, and pundits have promoted these myths, injecting them not just into the political discourse but also into popular culture[...] That version of events has also been promoted by Iran’s theocratic leaders, who have exploited it to stoke anti-Americanism and to obscure the fact that the clergy itself played a major role in toppling Mosaddeq.
In reality, the CIA’s impact on the events of 1953 was ultimately insignificant. Regardless of anything the United States did or did not do, Mosaddeq was bound to fall and the shah was bound to retain his throne and expand his power. Yet the narrative of American culpability has become so entrenched that it now shapes how many Americans understand the history of U.S.-Iranian relations and influences how American leaders think about Iran.&quo...
Thanks. I think framing the question that way distracts us from the facts, at least for my purposes (but I want to say, it's a pleasure and very interesting to talk to someone who has similar level of interest in and has a fundamental understanding of international relations):
The US (and UK) could play significant or necessary roles, without playing the leading or primary roles. And of course defining primary role is complicated: Is it influence? Power? If person A bribes a head of state to enact a certain policy, who has the primary role? The head of state does most of the work and has most of the power, but the briber was most necessary to it. And it would never happen if other parties and circumstances didn't allow it. Back to Iran: Of course there were forces opposing Mosaddeq that the US/UK backed: There are always other forces, though of varying influence, and how else would the US/UK do it? They weren't going to invade with their own troops. Only a complete moron (or George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Don Rumsfeld, with help from Tony Blair) would topple a national power structure without another power structure to replace it.
Also, having read a lot of foreign policy, I would say that few Americans know the narrative of overthrowing Mosaddeq, and fewer believe it. I'd guess almost the entire right wing of the political spectrum disbelieves it, as do most centrists.
Which isn't to say I know the real story. I imagine there is a lot of nuance, and framing it around the amount of influence the US/UK had compared to the clerical parties seems misguided - it's not a competition, and it gets us into matters of definition (as discussed above). Perhaps my feelings would be different if I was Iranian. I do get that Western foreign policy tended to objectify everyone else.
-------
I read those Foreign Affairs articles at the time (there were several, about Iran, Chile, Congo/Zaire, and I think elsewhere). My memory: While they were valuable for their perspective and arguments, some were quite improbable. IIRC Zaire and Chile claimed ignorance of what was happening and naivete about the intentions of the dictators. I don't recall what I thought of the Iran article.
Counterpoint: you say the US was just getting started messing around with other countries governments after world war 2, yet General Smedley Butler, who served from 1898-1931 described himself as a "gangster for capitalism" during this period.
So, maybe they had nothing to do with it and just lied about it, but your claim that they didn't even know how to do that kind of thing is plainly false, which throws doubt on the rest of your claims.
I've often wondered if the rescue operation wasn't such a spectacular failure[1], if he'd then been reelected. Had this been a success, it would've been one of the most complex missions ever attempted.
Yeah, I think so. It was such a terrible boondoggle and blunder. People who followed current events back then say it demoralized the country, so I think could have been the straw that broke the camel's back. It's like it was ill conceived and amateurish. Yes, accidents happen, but to be so unprepared is inexcusable (compare Grenada or Panama operations)
That's the irony of this article. Yes, it's true that Reagan gets credit for a lot of policies that were really Carter's. But it turned out, those policies were disastrous in the long term, both on the foreign policy and economic front.
In Martinez, CA (SF Bay Area) where most of Northern California oil refineries are located, didnt see any gas price dropped until a couple month after the 1980 election.
In some places there were gluts due to the DOE deciding which gas stations got gas. Yes, the DOE was deciding this at the individual gas station level, and they messed it all up.
I think the article buries the lede in the last paragraph, contrasted with the photographs of Carter and Reagan under the headline. I understand the article is about dispelling myths, requiring us to rehash those myths. But the author sometimes lapses into ascribing policies to politicians too much. They are just different policies than are usually ascribed.
Deregulation, privatization, cutting taxes, and tight money were all implemented in different developed countries in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It wasn't about personalities or parties, it was about reforming the postwar economic consensus that had run out of steam by the late 1970s. Even Mitterand had his U-turn.
The buried lede is that politics doesn't matter that much. Policies are chosen more based on "facts on the ground", which is sobering, can be reassuring to some, and also dispiriting to others if you want to effect radical change.
Wonks often use the phrase "moving the needle". That's about all politics can do proactively. Mostly policy changes are forced by external circumstances.
Indeed, the optics of politics suggest to the public that choices are on the line at opposite extreme ends. Good versus bad.
In reality, the political bandwidth of actual policy is far smaller. All developed nations swing from center left to right. Norway would be center-left, whilst Hungary would be right. Those are outer ends, most countries navigate a far smaller bandwidth, regardless of who is in charge.
In the US that bandwidth is from conservative to very conservative. The democrats are a right wing party.
>In the US that bandwidth is from conservative to very conservative. The democrats are a right wing party.
Nonsense.
Those (both American leftists, and Europeans who listen to them) who say that "Democrats in the US would be right wing in Europe/Canada" have to (for example) then agree that all major political parties in Canada and every European country outside the UK and Ireland are right of US Democrats, because there is no significant opposition to voter ID laws anywhere. Macron's Les Republicains got elected because voters liked his vow to get tough on unions and union pensions, and privatize more infrastructure, neither of which appears in Biden's campaign platform.
Speaking of which, several European countries have privatized post offices; not just telecom companies that were parts of PTTs, but entire postal services. It is the rare European country that hasn't sold off at least part of their postal services. The EU explicitly requires postal monopolies to end in member states; whether government-owned or not, EU postal services do not have the USPS's monopoly on first-class mail. Yet no major party in the US seriously talks about privatizing the USPS.[1] Does this mean that American politics is "far to the left" of that of Germany and the UK, both of which have completely sold off their postal services to private investors?
PS - For another example, consider the liberality of abortion laws in the US versus Europe.
[1] And no, it's not because of the Constitution. Article I Section 8 only gives Congress the authority "To establish Post Offices", as opposed to requiring a government-run one. Certainly nothing in the Constitution mandates the USPS's first-class mail monopoly.
Odd example, a post office. Here's some things that actually matter: a livable minimum wage, universal healthcare, accessible and affordable education, advanced safety nets for the unemployed and disabled, and so on.
Fundamental progressive values available in western Europe since about 5 decades. Normalized to not even count as explicitly progressive, instead seen as just basics.
> Macron's Les Republicains got elected because voters liked his vow to get tough on unions and union pensions, and privatize more infrastructure, neither of which appears in Biden's campaign platform.
This might be a valid point if American unions had anything close to the level of influence over US society that French unions have over France, but they don't, so it isn't.
>In the US that bandwidth is from conservative to very conservative. The democrats are a right wing party.
This depends heavily on how you measure left vs right.
Immigration, abortion, culture war issues(woke/anti-work/anti-racism), criminal justice, covid response, affirmative action. The line that separates left from right can be drawn in very different places depending on the locality.
True, it depends on how you measure things, and I was speaking mostly in comparison to western Europe.
Case in point, the right wing party in the Netherlands (VVD) that has ruled for a long time now, is fully in favor of a livable minimum wage, universal healthcare, accessible education, advanced safety nets for the unemployed and disabled. The issue of abortion has been solved in the 70s. They may tweak these systems to be more bare bones, but don't want to abolish them.
So that's our right wing. Far more progressive than the US democrats, which in this comparison would even come close to the far right. So the perspective matters, but to me there's one absolute point of view: without a livable wage and universal healthcare, the very word "progressive" shouldn't even be used. Without this foundation, you're OK with letting working people starve, or to let a sick person go bankrupt or die. Many countries wouldn't even call these basics progressive or left wing, they are found in deeply capitalistic and conservative societies across the world.
The woke in the US are an interesting case. They really are left wing, right now embedded in a democratic party that is comparably conservative. I smell conflict on the horizon.
The Dem and republican establishment both are head over heels for neoliberalism. There’s stuff that separates them. Still makes both of them conservative. Perhaps with such Overton window movement you can say it isn’t so.
As a next-level debunking, I'd like to question the frequency with which major trends and events are attributed so strongly to presidents. It can be politically useful, but it's usually historically questionable. The president of the U.S. is a powerful person, but far from an omnipotent one.
Just to take one example from the article, the deregulation of airlines in the U.S. Check out the wikipedia article[0]. Carter supported the bill, but its history goes back to the early 1970s, and lots of other parties were involved in making it happen, most notably Congress, which of course had to pass the law.
> Militarily, though, it’s worth pointing out that the USSR’s big military defeat came in Afghanistan. And though that war lasted until 1989, the crucial initial decision to arm the Soviets’ mujahideen opponents came from — you guessed it — Jimmy Carter.
In that the US won the Cold War, yes, it did indeed work out very well. It’s worth mentioning as well that most of the Taliban’s weaponry by the time the US invaded in 2001 was Soviet in origin, e.g. SA-2s, SA-3s, a few MIG-21s. They were also receiving direct military support from Pakistan throughout the late 90’s.
Maybe do some reading before you say silly things like this.
Even Reagan's defense establishment didn't want to give the muj shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, until the mid-80s. That's what really turned the tide. Carter would never in a million terms have done that.
Carter was a classic centrist. Both sides hated him. And by today's standards, Reagan was only slightly right of center. Reagan is remembered more fondly than Carter because of attitude. Carter told American: if we all sacrifice and work really hard, things will be pretty good again. Reagan told us: Everything going to be great because we deserve to be great. And yes, cheap oil destroyed the USSR, not the US military build up. The military build up pushed them over the edge, but they were already failing. US military leaders knew this at the time, that's why the build up happened when it did.
Reagan was a master at speaking to the public. It makes sense when you consider that he was an actor. But it's hard to really understand unless you've watch him in action.
The dude rolled and 18 for charisma then got a +7 bonus.
I've always found it baffling that 70s inflation was somehow magically blamed on progressive policy and pay rises and not on a far more obvious cause - oil price shocks.
In the 1973/4 crisis the price of crude quadrupled.
In the 1979 crisis it more than doubled.
On both occasions the price hikes were combined with physical shortages which did huge damage to economies which were - and largely still are - dependent on oil for everything from transport to energy to plastics to food production.
And yet... these economic cataclysms have been almost sidelined from the official economic narrative in both the UK and the US.
Ask a typical British voter about the history of the 70s and they'll tell you the UK was bankrupt because of excessive government spending, and not because the price of crude went through the roof.
It's one of the reasons I consider economics a branch of propaganda and not a real science. Clearly the oil shocks were an economic catastrophe and were directly responsible for very severe inflation. But somehow the effects are still blamed on wage growth and (in the UK) unionisation - both of which were far more credibly an effect than a primary cause.
Rather than economics itself being a tool of propaganda (which might be true but I think most economists would say they strive to be evidence-based), I think it demonstrates that the average voter’s views on economics are more or less worthless.
> I think it demonstrates that the average voter’s views on economics are more or less worthless.
Poli-sci research is depressingly consistent in demonstrating that the average voters' views on everything are worthless. It's amazing the system works at all, even for very generous values of "works".
Research on voters' understanding of issues, and of the world, largely amounts to a less-funny version of that thing where a late night show has someone go out and get people to give incredibly stupid answers to easy questions.
Economics is so closely tied to politics that I don't really blame the public for seeing it as worthless. I couldn't tell you what modern economic theories look like, but I could certainly talk about Reagan's trickle-down economics.
Rather than economics itself being a tool of propaganda (which might be true but I think most economists would say they strive to be evidence-based), I think it demonstrates that the average voter’s views on economics are more or less worthless.
Your second point is not an alternative to the first, rather it is implied by the first.
Actually it wasn’t. The national debt had been falling for a few years when Nixon took the US off the gold standard. This was even discussed on HN in the past few days.
By that time, gold redemptions were mainly available only to foreign entities. Unlike all other forms of money[1], only US federal government spending, in cooperation with the Fed, could create new reserves[2]. That there were too many reserves in foreign hands chasing $35 an ounce gold could only be the result of US federal spending. Therefore while foreign demand was the proximate cause, it was definitely a downstream consequence.
The size of the US government's outstanding liabilities at the time isn't relevant, what affects prices is money flows, not stocks.
The way you put it sounds rather backwards and gives me "wet streets are causing rain" vibes, as if lots of government increase of the money supply won't cause demand for scarce resources and drive up their prices via sudden increases in demand with the newly available cash that can't be met by similar increases in supply.
Are you trying to tell me here? That was no stagflation in the 70s and the only problems were in '73 and '79 and we can pretend the rest of the decade never happened?
You can't handwave away the main resource of the century going up in price like a rocket in a world where oil shocks were practically unheard of in times of peace.
Oil goes both ways. Ask Texans why the oil bust in the 80’s happened. Not a clue then or now.
Not that Reagan supported a war between Iraq and Iran, played both sides, caused OPEC to fall apart and flood the market dropping the price to $15 barrel.
What are you talking about here? The human genome is highly studied and prestigious researchers are publishing about it today as they have been for many years.
Are you perhaps talking about the various kinds of debunked race "science" that never bothered to look at genomes when it could stop at skin color?
Smith has some good arguments and incomplete arguments. Since anyone can read the article for the good arguments, I'll note a few of the dubious and incomplete ones:
A) When talking about deregulation, Smith looks at laws, but he should be looking at agencies even more. Agencies after all do most of the day-to-day regulation. How can Smith seriously ignore things like appointing Anne Gorsuch to head the EPA in 1981? At the beginning, Reagan nominations were known for their hostility to regulation, and Smith would have done better to check whether this was actually true.
B) Arguing that Soviet military expenditure wasn't a big deal because they spent more in WW2 is crazy. Smith is comparing a peace-time spend to a total war spend!
C) Oil's role in USSR's collapse is well-known. Well known enough to have claims by Reagan partisans that he convinced the Saudis to keep prices low to pressure the USSR. Is this right? Very debatable. But it's directly related to the thesis of the article and Smith completely ignores this.
> But another is that successful policy takes a long time to work.
I am familiar with a much better expression of this lesson by, of all people, bill gates:
> We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction.
I’ve been following the “you’re wrong about” podcast, the whole premise is to look back at past well known events mostly based on what was published at the time.
It’s fascinating how much the mainstream narrative deviates from “the facts” even with them available to anyone who cares to check.
Reality is highly subjective so I hesitate to make arguments about how media failed to report 'the facts' of situations.
However, its pretty clear to me that the media's ability to assert certain opinions by asserting with more force is not conducive to a healthy long-term society.
> Are there really people who don’t remember Carter the deregulator?
Yes. 40 years of propaganda and hagiography of Reagan has left a significant minority of the US population in delusion about nearly anything political, including people who lived through the events in question.
Hell, a good subset of people are trapped in such an insanity bubble that people who had siblings die of polio in their youth suddenly decided vaccines are a giant conspiracy in 2021.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 68.2 ms ] threadRonald + Maggie's relationship was legendary though, and defined the era of Boomers in their 20s and 30s.
I don't really remember the show but it brings to mind people drinking scotch out tea mugs and shouting "who's the slag what done the blag?" at some poor "snout".
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071059/
To get a gang of villains in a shed up at Heathrow
They're counting out the fivers when the handcuffs lock again
In and out of Wandsworth with the numbers on their names
It's funny how their missus always looks the bleeding same
And meanwhile at the station, there's a couple of likely lads
Who swear like how's your father and they're very cool for cats
They're cool for cats (Cool for cats)"
Carter and Reagan were polar opposites. Carter was a fiscal conservative and Reagan was a spendthrift. Reagan was when the deficit floodgates opened. We've repeated this fiscally conservative Democrat followed by spendthrift Republican ever since.
Clinton for example, left at the peak of the DotCom bubble, and was bouyed by capital gains tax revenue, whereas Bush left during the Great Recession.
Moreover, just as Afghanistan and Iraq were disastrous wars of choice, W's tax cuts, Medicare Part D and his zero down payment home loan programs were the direct cause of that recession.
Afghanistan and Iraq were disasters and Obama had 8 years to end them but never did.
Everyone wanted Gadaffi gone, even Putin. Hence the UN resolutions. It was funny that Gingrich was calling for intervention ... until the next day.
Complaining that W and Obama are on good terms? Wow.
Obama clearly did increase the deficit as national debt went from $10T to $19.5T during his tenure. In other words, the debt increased by nearly as much as every president prior to Obama. Of course, we seem to find ourselves on an irreversible debt slope that is rapidly accelerating and I suspect that every future administration will outspend the one prior.
To discuss this without mentioning the Global Financial crisis seems a bit disingenuous. I'm no fan of Obama but this is not a valid criticism, IMO.
Obama didn't increase that debt by spending. He did it by inheriting Bush's Great Recession with its sky high unemployment and lack of tax revenues. He managed to decrease the deficit each year until his last. Obama's singular spending initiative, the ACA or Obamacare, is dirt cheap compared to the $6T of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And then there's Medicare Part D.
BTW, the ACA cost the Democrats the House as well. Some things are worth fighting for.
Deficit increases under these presidents isn't as much on the business cycle as you indicate. For example, Clinton enjoyed higher capital gains tax revenue, but he also signed legislation to increase taxes (which obviously impact the deficit). Conversely, Bush chose not to include substantial additional revenue in his recession-era emergency spending plans. Both were policy choices that entirely support the OP's point.
In fact, although Trump and Biden were not included in the list, they are following the same schema. Trump cut tax revenue and then didn't offset massive deficit spending on his way out the door. Biden's signature economic plan is stalled in part because he is making efforts at offsetting spending with increased revenue.
In Jimmy Carter's four years, the Federal Government's spending increased by almost 48%. In Ronald Reagans eight years, Federal Government spending increased only 53%.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/federal-budg...
https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1970_201...
Imagine we passed a law that only made one tenth of currency still viable, and reduced the size of all owed debts and contacts denominated in dollars by 10x. Effectively making the dollar 10x more valuable. This would cut our absolute deficit spending by 10x. Would this then let us increase inflation adjusted government spending by 10x without suffering any ill effects from deficit spending? The obvious answer to that is no, which then implies inflation or gdp adjusted deficit spending is a far more important metric.
Inflation in the 70s preceded Carter. There was the oil crisis. It preceded that. Nixon ordered price controls ... in 1970.
No, 70s inflation had nothing to do with Carter's 'spending'. Carter's spending as a percentage of the GDP decreased from 1977 (19.65%) to 1979 (19.18%). It increased in 1980.
In no real universe was Carter anything but a fiscal conservative. In no real universe were Reagan and Bush anything but profligate.
However I tend to agree that prior to Obama, presidents from the Democratic Party were the more fiscally responsible.
[0] https://www.thebalance.com/deficit-by-president-what-budget-...
If you look at the numbers, the Clinton "surplus" was merely some fancy accounting achieved by borrowing money from government trust funds, like social security.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=IuLV
What numbers? Care to cite them?
Social Security has always held its surplus in t-bonds. Ergo, the government has always "borrowed" from SS. So I'm having trouble seeing how it was magically different under Clinton. And also why republican presidents don't use the same "fancy accounting" to make their deficits look lower.
A balanced budget (i.e., zero deficit) or even a large but insufficient surplus doesn't stop the national debt growing. It's like a credit card. Even if every month you pay off what you spent the previous month (balanced budget), the interest keeps compounding on the principal you owe and your total debt keeps growing. Unless the government makes a serious effort at paying off the interest and paying down the principal, the national debt will keep growing. (Of course, the principal plus interest becomes the new principal on each compounding cycle, so the principal is a moving target.)
UPDATE: Fixed table formatting.
US Constitution: Article I, Section 8, Clause 1.
Article 1 Section 9 Clause 7 is closer. It says Congress has to pass an appropriation before spending money. That’s still not budgeting.
The 1921 Budget and Accounting Act says that the President has to submit a budget proposal. Congress modifies and passes it. The President signs that or there’s a continuing resolution.
No, Congress doesn’t control the budget, either Constitutionally or procedurally. The President proposes one and generally gets most of what they want.
In fact, Congress doesn’t even pass a budget. The President proposes a budget, required by law, and Congress passes appropriations bills, required by the Constitution.
Also obviously with the end of the cold war, what most of this articles miss, the US lost Europe. Before e.g. Germanys establishment pushed US nuclear weapons ("Jump!" "How high?") into Germany against a large part of it's polutation, after 1990 no country in Europe jumps anymore when the US says "Jump!", because the Soviet scare is gone.
Through NATO they follow us along into dubious, pointless, dangerous US conflicts, sparing the US President from asking Congress for authorization, while bearing the brunt of extraterritorial attacks since there arent two gigantic oceans separating them from the conflict.
The US uses almost countless Europe located bases for missile shields against Russia and to many hawkish people the cold war is still going on as if it was the 80s still.
Europe still depends on Russia for energy so this symbiosis is seen as important.
But I think this changes because the UK was the only EU member state vetoing an EU military, and with them gone the EU can arm itself. Dismantling a lot of the need for the US, we can mostly assume it will be to keep out Russia and lessen the burden of NATO but there are a lot of values that differ if we are being honest.
The complete list of countries known to have nuclear weapons worldwide is The United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. Now that the UK is no longer in the EU, France is it.
In fact France is surprisingly militaristic. For example it is the only EU country in the top 10 on https://www.globalfirepower.com/countries-listing.php.
Per https://fas.org/blogs/security/2006/11/new_article_where_the..., about 15 years ago the only country to put its nuclear weapons in other countries was the USA. That said, US nuclear missiles are in many EU countries thanks to NATO.
They are also wrapping up their own counterterrorism operation in the Sahel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barkhane
[Edit] After 1990.
Sarkozy: https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/thanks-but-no-th...
I'm not saying you're wrong -- I'm happy to get other evidence, but can you point me to something?
Update: thanks!
As a European, I tend to agree with that assessment, particularly with countries like Germany.
Most of the US military presence might be gone compared to cold war levels, but the pro-US political presence mostly remains the same.
Which is actually quite astounding considering we are slowly entering the second decade of when this distancing started [0] and it had plenty of additional contributions since then [1].
[0] https://www.csmonitor.com/2001/0919/p12s2-woeu.html
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/2014...
Public political discussion always considered the US, because of the scare of the Soviet Union, which was daily present (how many millions of kids in the 80s in Europe feared nuclear war?).
But already in 1990 when I was in the military the attitude had changed a lot.
To this day it's completely legal for the NSA to operate in Germany and spy on literally anybody [0]
Neither do I see the attitude change on a grander political level in Germany. Most of the German political landscape is still plenty happy displaying a double-moral that's would transplant neatly right back into the cold war [1]
One of the weirder examples: Persecuting alleged Syrian torturers for crimes against humanity committed in Syria [2].
While crimes against humanity committed by the US, trough German territory, are apparently not in the jurisdiction of German courts [3].
That's not what a "neutral" Germany looks and acts like, that's what a Germany looks and acts like that was for decades groomed to be a US vassal.
[0] https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2013-10/nsa-uerberwa...
[1] https://youtu.be/C4RalenYhoY
[2] https://www.dw.com/en/german-court-hands-down-historic-syria...
[3] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/08/germany-could-have-deli...
One of the most fascinating theories that I've read on this is that this was the result of a secret alliance between Reagan's CIA and the Catholic Church. The basic outlines of the alliance was that the CIA supplied money and material on non-violent resistance (through deniable channels), the Catholic Church supplied the network and connections that could distribute them. Also the two aligned on other things, such as tying US foreign aid to abortion policies that the Catholic Church liked.
What does Poland have to do with all of this? Pope John Paul II was Polish, and so their test became the Solidarity movement in Poland. After that proved a success, they replicated it throughout the Eastern Block.
I first read this theory in a Mother Jones article back in the 1980s. And every so often I wish I could find it to read it again.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1983/07/their-will-be-d...
(Asides: My first impulse to find the article was archive.org, but after that failed, Google delivered on the first try!)
The disastrous response to Chernobyl also gave a boost to independence movements in Ukraine and the Baltics. Gorbachev has always been in denial about how his policies helped hasten the collapse.
The timeline does not work on this. Gorbachev was in power only from 1985, while Solidarity got thwarted in 1981, during introduction of Marital Law (key leaders got arrested, the strikes and protests were broken down, sometimes using lethal force). The Polish communist party justified these harsh measures with exactly the argument that it's still better than a foreign (Soviet) invasion of their country.
Another fascinating chapter from that era, if you're interested in the revolution in Iran and resulting US election, is covered in the book "October Surprise," by Gary Sick. While the author states soberly that we don't have all the details, those we do point in an unfortunate direction. That many in the Reagan admin would be behind bars and implicated with the Iran arms scandal less than a decade later has also largely been forgotten. The two events are thought to be unconnected.
At the time Reagan often said he "didn't recall…" Back then I thought he was omitting the truth, but then we found he had Alzheimer's a few years later, and turned out it was probably true he didn't remember a thing. Can't make this stuff up, folks.
There was also a good Frontline episode on the subject, but I've not been able to find it due to PBS' shenanigans. Maybe they lost the tape.
The topic of Reagan's decline in office is debated, but we should be wary of premising conclusions on it. Reagan was probably fully competent while serving as President.
Biden however has been reported as declining mentally since 2012, yet his family and the Democratic Party knowingly propped him up as a Presidential candidate. And here we are.
Reagan was shot in the ribs, not to be confused with Brady. No one is perfect; I expect B to step down at the end of the term or sooner.
Yeah, can you even imagine President Biden saying "person, woman, man, camera, TV"? I guess that proves he's got some real issues.
It's for this exact reason that r/AskHistorians has a time limit on how recent events can be before they're discussed there. We're not working under the letter of r/AskHistorians, but we definitely are working to its spirit.
Leave Trump and Biden out of this.
I mean, I admire the idea of message discipline, but it seems strange to enforce this rule so selectively.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
or this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The purpose of linking to old moderation comments isn't statistical, it's to explain the principles we use.
EDIT: In way, it is appropriate for a discussion on how false narratives are formed.
https://www.amazon.com/End-Alzheimers-Program-Prevent-Cognit...
The protocol isn't wacky, it's just a list of healthy things everyone should do (like getting enough sleep). I've been following much of it myself.
(I have no particular admiration for Reagan, and found the rehabilitation of Carter in this post pretty compelling; I'm not here to stick up for Reagan, but rather just to point out a curious echo of the theme of the post in this thread).
An admittedly second hand data point - a friend of mine in the 90's worked with AZ nurses who'd just look at him and say "he's got AZ".
Thirdly, there's a long history of physicians examining presidents and publicly minimizing any health issues. This is for good reason, you don't want to let on to America's enemies that the president is not in good form.
Lastly, AZ is a decades long process. By the time it is diagnosed, the symptoms have been there for at least a decade, unrecognized. After my father was diagnosed, looking back on things, I realized it had been happening for a long time.
Also, skits like this one by SNL made in 1986 (copied from elsewhere) wouldn't have been made unless people were already noticing a disconnect... even if they didn't know the exact cause:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5wfPlgKFh8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_hostage_crisis#Release
Carter negotiated end to the hostage crisis (Algiers Accords of January 19, 1981).
The United States (Dulles) overthrew the democratically elected Mossadegh in 1953 and installed the Shah. Then Eisenhower, JFK, Nixon, Ford and yes Carter completely supported the Shah. The Iranian revolutionaries held that against us and in particular, against the then president, Jimmy Carter. Given what we did to them, they had a point.
The resulting hostage crisis was the smallest humiliation the US ever suffered. Compare that to Saddam sending an Exocet into the Stark or Israel strafing the Liberty.
Reagan made much of this crisis during the election, and the hostages were released on inauguration day. Then Reagan supported Iraq in their invasion of Iran AND also sold missiles to Iran. A strange foreign policy, mostly beholden to whatever Saudi Arabia and Israel wanted on a given day.
As one can see, conspiracy theories are not a new invention. This particular one has been investigated and debunked over and over (wiki has a decent overview for once).
There's also lots of documentation about the Reagan campaign's "counter october-surprise" activities. They were very active and making ties all over. It was a big deal in 1980 on the news every single night. Could and did make/break the election. The administration had the highest number of people put behind bars or on their way before being pardoned. They played dirty and everyone knows it.
These parts aren't under dispute either.
A few years later the same people are all caught in a number of treasonous dealings, with... the other same exact people.
(Not to mention: Name any mainstream Americans who'd think to sell arms to Iran in the 80s? It borders on the ridiculous. Very few folks would even contemplate the idea, much less execute. Narrowed suspects with high motivation.)
Where there's smoke, there's fire, unless you refuse to smell it.
When push comes to shove, you have a few unimportant Americans which consider any publication to be evidence, and Banisadr, which was an loony exile by that time (actually he was more than a bit loony beforehand).
I also recall the hearings were far more incensed with the idea of funding the Contras (ignoring the Congressional ban) than with Iran arms which was considered merely a cynical play to serve US interests.
e.g. the Chase Bank memoir, despite the publication being if anything an argument against, since the Reagan campaign wouldn't have to spread rumors if they had a deal.
Even my mother, a product of an FDR world, who threw shoes at Reagan on TV could not stop laughing about how over the top it was.
I credit Nancy. She saw the ideologues he put in during the first term where driving for a cliff and brought Baker, Deaver and Schultz in to right the ship. It helped to have someone like Tip O’Neil in the House who thought impeaching over Iran Contra would be bad for the country.
Reagan, like W Bush wasn’t incompetent, he was just incurious and easily led the farther he went up. Look at Reagan’s 1964 speeches and W’s Governor debates and it’s like they both fell of a skateboard and cracked their heads open once they ran for President.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQm7EEnN-0E
Trump has nothing as far as destruction of this country compared to Reagan. You want to trace the end of the American Empire -- put that blame on Reagan and his acolytes first.
I grew up in the 70s and 80s, and can certainly complain about a lot of things about that time.
In your mind, what are the top few most wretched aspects of that time? I grew up in south central Los Angeles, and so gang and drug crime would be the top of my list.
I live in LA now and ride the bus through South Central, and I've lived there and I have found that place far more welcoming to me than I ever did back in Montana.
So, YMMV and the grass is always greener. But I'm a lot happier in the poor parts of LA than I ever was in Billings, Montana.
South central has enormously improved since the late 70s up through the early 90s. As a kid, I was personally shot up a couple of times from the street. Crack houses were everywhere, and the gangs were pretty terrifying.
The predators in the elementary school are allowed to prey. While I don't want to discount how bad things were in South Central back then, a lot of white people crime is swept under the rug and a lot of crime in ethnically diverse neighborhoods is splashed on front page news.
I don't care who is the president, growing up in Billings Montana will always suck!
The process that Volker's Fed set in motion is with us today. Have a gander at the historical constant-maturity 30-year bond:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DGS30
Zoom out to the multi-decade view and notice something: a peak in late-1981 and a relentless slide toward zero today. You won't find a multi-decade channel like this in many other places.
These ever-lower long-term yields have played a major role in the housing market bubble that ended in 2008 and the one still inflating today. It could also be argued that this trend toward ever-lower long-term yields has been responsible the increasingly outlandish stock market valuations and the never-ending quest for yield (i.e. risk) that we currently see by institutions, individuals, and foreign governments.
I see this graph in a number of places, I think it's something 'talked about'.
The issue, I believe, is fundamentally demographics combined with decreasing marginal returns to tech and progress.
1970's was when the baby boomers were entering the workplace, and there were a lot of them, now, not so much.
For decades after WW2 American industry was 'ahead' of the factories in Europe and Japan which were bombed into nothing.
So there was a natural slowdown in growth afterwards.
Then every loosening monetary policy with a big bump in 2008 and an even bigger bump in 2021 and you have what you have.
"ever-lower long-term yields have played a major role in the housing market bubble that ended in 2008"
I think it's better to say they are an indicator of something material, but 'lower bond yields' are not the 'driver of housing inflation'.
That said, I agree with a lot of the things said in the article.
The solution is to dig in to statements of truth for yourself until you uncover verifiable facts. This is true as much for assertions in electoral campaign literature as much as claims of grand conspiracies to subvert privileges through widespread intramuscular injections of 5G microchips. Check the references provided, and if there are no references then check your gullibility.
When it comes time to vote, the PR machines start up and people are made to pretend they are thinking objectively when actually we are about as prepared as we'd be at a wine tasting. The analogy continues, because whatever we decided we think we were well justified later on, regardless of what actually happened.
I'm glad I read this article, it's well presented with sources, and debunks some quite important myths.
How so? The chart suggesting Volcker "saved" the US from inflation seems to suggest otherwise. The Fed was already trending towards what the "Volcker Fed" did. The "list of significant deregulations" on Wikipedia is actually listed as "Related legislation". Reagan had a greater number of deregulation legislation listed as directly related to Reagan's administration rather than in the "Related legislation" so there is some game playing going on as far as the significance of each administration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation
One explanation of why we should prefer democracy that I quite like goes like this:
It doesn't have to rely on everyone being smart, or even thinking. It only has to rely on the statistical likelihood that, even with all the errors and noise and lack of thinking and even stupidity that might manifest in any individual, if more than half the voters agree on something, there's a better chance that it's the right choice than the wrong one.THere are all kinds of holes that can be poked in this approach, and I sometimes do that, but fundamentally I stand by the basic conception that this describes.
I'd say that this is a glib simplification that conveys almost no information about the actual state of US politics at any level.
And I'm not so sure that it's the case when information required to make the choice is lacking, and agitprop is substituted instead.
That one's a slam dunk. Who wouldn't?
I mean, that's the extent of the "logic" as far as it goes. But enough for votes in the ballot box. The world is too damn complicated. I barely can get my tv to operate, and you're supposed to expect me to understand the ins and outs of federal reserve policy, economics, and climate change?
Mueller's report was damning. But the story it told was so complicated that only obsessed people could keep the details straight, and most of those people were heavily invested in the outcome one way or the other anyway.
Feeling cynical right now i guess.
Rush & others said such-and-such about Carter. Day. After day. After day. Until he believed it.
Those events did not happen that long ago, and it's a 5 second search to find out what president signed those.
(hackernews won't let me reply to the previous comment, sorry about that!)
[0] https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898030615000366
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
To throw a bone to a side that I usually disagree with, Smith could have also productively contrasted that latter century bipartisan fiscal irresponsibility with the relative sobriety of the New Deal just in terms of deficits and long term sustainability. It may seem weird on the face of it given how the New Deal tends to be portrayed in contemporary times by both the left and the right, but FDR might have been the last real fiscal conservative of the 20th century both in terms of rhetoric and policy until Bill Clinton closed out the millennium. Despite what seemed to be bitter acrimony during the Clinton administration, the Reagan-Clinton years were probably the last ones in which there was a productive competitive dynamic between both parties. It was also the last time in my memory that there was serious discussion of entitlement reform: that was really wiped out from public debate after 9/11. Back then, you could credibly argue that the competition between the parties resulted in better policy thinking on both sides. In contemporary times the competition seems more to result in more aggressive stupidity on both sides: they both tend to make each other dumber to own the cons/libs at the expense of the public.
Gives me a bad taste in my mouth to have to say something nice about a Noah Smith article.
Yes, this needs to be debunked. I was in high school during the Carter years and I was into politics (seems odd for someone that age). There's a reason that Carter was primaried by Ted Kennedy in 1980: many Democrats found Carter too fiscally conservative. Carter was a deficit hawk. He pushed for a balanced budget and that upset many Democrats at the time because he wasn't proposing the large social spending increases they wanted to see.
I think Carter is definitely an underrated president who likely would have been re-elected had the Iranian hostage crisis not happened. He was a visionary especially in terms of the environment and global climate change (which his administration began to address). But he was much more of a centrist than a liberal - though the center has moved to the right since his time.
Yep. The October Surprise by Team Reagan worked very well.
Blowback keeps happening. IIRC, the modern Central American drug gangs were born of US funding and training of anti-Communist forces in the 1980s.
Remember it next time someone says, 'let's send arms to those insurgents!' Obama dialed it back, partly for that reason (AFAIK). Biden apparently has embraced a policy of 'restraint', with the idea that outcomes from US intervention often are counter-productive.
(I don't support it - instead, accept the challenge and find better interventions. Quitting is a bizarre solution IMHO. People still need freedom, and need help.)
Then we could have incentives -- hey, go to this mosque, not that one and we'll pay you $20 more a week.
It would be cheaper than what we do now and would be a lot more effective than dropping bombs on wedding parties.
We do sometimes buy off governments, effectively, via foreign aid.
Gave weapons to Syrian rebels.
Gave weapons to Libyan rebels.
> Gave weapons to Syrian rebels.
That was the main place they limited supplying arms, IIRC. For example, (again IIRC) the US wouldn't send portable anti-aircraft weapons.
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1981/10/08/Reagan-lifts-ban-on-...
Wouldn't exactly call that "killing off nuclear power" - Three Mile Island and the movie The China Syndrome did that. The movie was released ~2 weeks before the accident on March 28, 1979.
That crisis is still going on 40 years later!
First, it was the Clerical class that was most responsible for the overthrow. They were the ones with the organization and the power and the political networks. They then recruited the British to help them, who were the second most important factor. The British had intelligence assets in Iran. The US was basically a bagman, paying off $100,000 to some of the actors on behalf of the British, and for the clerics.
The U.S. simply didn't have a lot of intelligence assets in Iran, nor did it have any troops there, nor did it have a lot of sway over Iran. It was an intermediary between the actors that actually held power. One can argue that the payment of $100,000 - that was the sole contribution of the U.S. to the coup - was what made the difference. I doubt it. Then the US CIA chief played up his role in the coup in an attempt to gain political points.
Yet this complex history is boiled down to "US overthrows democratically elected government". I mean, come on.
But what's useful about such a narrative is that the U.S. (and also the U.S.S.R.) were involved in the politics of basically every country. Even if all they did was throw a dinner at their embassy or promise some foreign aid. So all you need to do is look at whichever side the U.S. was on in some local dispute, and then if that side won, you say "US forces nation to do X".
This is bad history.
UPDATE: people have been clamoring for links, so see this comment for more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29102780
I've read narratives attributing it to the US and UK in serious sources, such as (IIRC) Foreign Affairs.
- The clerics were the most powerful political group in Iran, and were the best organized. The main enemy of the clerics were the communists.
- The communists were making headways, which made the clerics extremely unhappy
- Mosaddegh was viewed as appeasing the communists, which made the clerics even more unhappy
- Mosaddegh rigged a constitutional election (99% votes to agree) which made him extremely unpopular
- The initial US-Anglo coup efforts actually failed
- The UK had financial interests, assets on the ground, and much more experience with coup plotting than the U.S.
- The US didn't have a lot of assets on the ground or particularly understood Iran very well, given that this was shortly after WW2 and they were just starting their world-policing role -- rather incompetently.
So that would be the starting point for skepticism about the importance of the U.S. role, which just comes from background knowledge.
Note I am not saying the U.S. was not involved in making payments. It was. I am saying that that was a secondary role.
Now, onto specific data. It is based on the following observations:
Whereas US FRUS data attributes a huge role for the U.S., British data does not. And the British were much more involved in Iran. So how can that be? Well, the theory is the US CIA station chief exaggerated his role, and then this went into FRUS and right into the eager hands of all the Chomsky readers out there who want to view every nation as without agency, without internal political forces, but merely as puppets of the U.S. which can snap it's fingers and force regime change wherever and whenever it wants.
Here is a link to an article covering some recently declassified British data:
"In recent years, new interpretations of the coup have called into question the accuracy of various U.S. archival records and first-person accounts, discounting the importance of the CIA and British intelligence role in the operation and casting doubt on any connection between Iranian clerics and the Western powers. The principal aim of the latter contention is to bolster the case that Iranians, including leading mullahs, acted essentially (if not entirely) on their own in bringing about Mosaddeq’s ouster."[1]
Here is more data from Foreign Affairs[2]:
"Yet there was a supreme irony to Obama’s concession. The history of the U.S. role in Iran’s 1953 coup may be “well known,” as the president declared in his speech, but it is not well founded. On the contrary, it rests heavily on two related myths: that machinations by the CIA were the most important factor in Mosaddeq’s downfall and that Iran’s brief democratic interlude was spoiled primarily by American and British meddling. For decades, historians, journalists, and pundits have promoted these myths, injecting them not just into the political discourse but also into popular culture[...] That version of events has also been promoted by Iran’s theocratic leaders, who have exploited it to stoke anti-Americanism and to obscure the fact that the clergy itself played a major role in toppling Mosaddeq.
In reality, the CIA’s impact on the events of 1953 was ultimately insignificant. Regardless of anything the United States did or did not do, Mosaddeq was bound to fall and the shah was bound to retain his throne and expand his power. Yet the narrative of American culpability has become so entrenched that it now shapes how many Americans understand the history of U.S.-Iranian relations and influences how American leaders think about Iran.&quo...
The US (and UK) could play significant or necessary roles, without playing the leading or primary roles. And of course defining primary role is complicated: Is it influence? Power? If person A bribes a head of state to enact a certain policy, who has the primary role? The head of state does most of the work and has most of the power, but the briber was most necessary to it. And it would never happen if other parties and circumstances didn't allow it. Back to Iran: Of course there were forces opposing Mosaddeq that the US/UK backed: There are always other forces, though of varying influence, and how else would the US/UK do it? They weren't going to invade with their own troops. Only a complete moron (or George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Don Rumsfeld, with help from Tony Blair) would topple a national power structure without another power structure to replace it.
Also, having read a lot of foreign policy, I would say that few Americans know the narrative of overthrowing Mosaddeq, and fewer believe it. I'd guess almost the entire right wing of the political spectrum disbelieves it, as do most centrists.
Which isn't to say I know the real story. I imagine there is a lot of nuance, and framing it around the amount of influence the US/UK had compared to the clerical parties seems misguided - it's not a competition, and it gets us into matters of definition (as discussed above). Perhaps my feelings would be different if I was Iranian. I do get that Western foreign policy tended to objectify everyone else.
-------
I read those Foreign Affairs articles at the time (there were several, about Iran, Chile, Congo/Zaire, and I think elsewhere). My memory: While they were valuable for their perspective and arguments, some were quite improbable. IIRC Zaire and Chile claimed ignorance of what was happening and naivete about the intentions of the dictators. I don't recall what I thought of the Iran article.
So, maybe they had nothing to do with it and just lied about it, but your claim that they didn't even know how to do that kind of thing is plainly false, which throws doubt on the rest of your claims.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eagle_Claw
The gas lines disappeared literally overnight (I know this from personal experience) and never returned.
It's hard to overestimate what a disaster the long lines for gas were.
Deregulation, privatization, cutting taxes, and tight money were all implemented in different developed countries in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It wasn't about personalities or parties, it was about reforming the postwar economic consensus that had run out of steam by the late 1970s. Even Mitterand had his U-turn.
The buried lede is that politics doesn't matter that much. Policies are chosen more based on "facts on the ground", which is sobering, can be reassuring to some, and also dispiriting to others if you want to effect radical change.
Wonks often use the phrase "moving the needle". That's about all politics can do proactively. Mostly policy changes are forced by external circumstances.
In reality, the political bandwidth of actual policy is far smaller. All developed nations swing from center left to right. Norway would be center-left, whilst Hungary would be right. Those are outer ends, most countries navigate a far smaller bandwidth, regardless of who is in charge.
In the US that bandwidth is from conservative to very conservative. The democrats are a right wing party.
Nonsense.
Those (both American leftists, and Europeans who listen to them) who say that "Democrats in the US would be right wing in Europe/Canada" have to (for example) then agree that all major political parties in Canada and every European country outside the UK and Ireland are right of US Democrats, because there is no significant opposition to voter ID laws anywhere. Macron's Les Republicains got elected because voters liked his vow to get tough on unions and union pensions, and privatize more infrastructure, neither of which appears in Biden's campaign platform.
Speaking of which, several European countries have privatized post offices; not just telecom companies that were parts of PTTs, but entire postal services. It is the rare European country that hasn't sold off at least part of their postal services. The EU explicitly requires postal monopolies to end in member states; whether government-owned or not, EU postal services do not have the USPS's monopoly on first-class mail. Yet no major party in the US seriously talks about privatizing the USPS.[1] Does this mean that American politics is "far to the left" of that of Germany and the UK, both of which have completely sold off their postal services to private investors?
PS - For another example, consider the liberality of abortion laws in the US versus Europe.
[1] And no, it's not because of the Constitution. Article I Section 8 only gives Congress the authority "To establish Post Offices", as opposed to requiring a government-run one. Certainly nothing in the Constitution mandates the USPS's first-class mail monopoly.
Fundamental progressive values available in western Europe since about 5 decades. Normalized to not even count as explicitly progressive, instead seen as just basics.
This might be a valid point if American unions had anything close to the level of influence over US society that French unions have over France, but they don't, so it isn't.
This depends heavily on how you measure left vs right.
Immigration, abortion, culture war issues(woke/anti-work/anti-racism), criminal justice, covid response, affirmative action. The line that separates left from right can be drawn in very different places depending on the locality.
Case in point, the right wing party in the Netherlands (VVD) that has ruled for a long time now, is fully in favor of a livable minimum wage, universal healthcare, accessible education, advanced safety nets for the unemployed and disabled. The issue of abortion has been solved in the 70s. They may tweak these systems to be more bare bones, but don't want to abolish them.
So that's our right wing. Far more progressive than the US democrats, which in this comparison would even come close to the far right. So the perspective matters, but to me there's one absolute point of view: without a livable wage and universal healthcare, the very word "progressive" shouldn't even be used. Without this foundation, you're OK with letting working people starve, or to let a sick person go bankrupt or die. Many countries wouldn't even call these basics progressive or left wing, they are found in deeply capitalistic and conservative societies across the world.
The woke in the US are an interesting case. They really are left wing, right now embedded in a democratic party that is comparably conservative. I smell conflict on the horizon.
Just to take one example from the article, the deregulation of airlines in the U.S. Check out the wikipedia article[0]. Carter supported the bill, but its history goes back to the early 1970s, and lots of other parties were involved in making it happen, most notably Congress, which of course had to pass the law.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_Deregulation_Act
That worked out well...
Even Reagan's defense establishment didn't want to give the muj shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, until the mid-80s. That's what really turned the tide. Carter would never in a million terms have done that.
The dude rolled and 18 for charisma then got a +7 bonus.
In the 1973/4 crisis the price of crude quadrupled.
In the 1979 crisis it more than doubled.
On both occasions the price hikes were combined with physical shortages which did huge damage to economies which were - and largely still are - dependent on oil for everything from transport to energy to plastics to food production.
And yet... these economic cataclysms have been almost sidelined from the official economic narrative in both the UK and the US.
Ask a typical British voter about the history of the 70s and they'll tell you the UK was bankrupt because of excessive government spending, and not because the price of crude went through the roof.
It's one of the reasons I consider economics a branch of propaganda and not a real science. Clearly the oil shocks were an economic catastrophe and were directly responsible for very severe inflation. But somehow the effects are still blamed on wage growth and (in the UK) unionisation - both of which were far more credibly an effect than a primary cause.
Poli-sci research is depressingly consistent in demonstrating that the average voters' views on everything are worthless. It's amazing the system works at all, even for very generous values of "works".
Research on voters' understanding of issues, and of the world, largely amounts to a less-funny version of that thing where a late night show has someone go out and get people to give incredibly stupid answers to easy questions.
Your second point is not an alternative to the first, rather it is implied by the first.
The size of the US government's outstanding liabilities at the time isn't relevant, what affects prices is money flows, not stocks.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#United_States
[2] Back then the Fed wasn't willing to just expand its own balance sheet significantly on its own initiative as it is now.
The way you put it sounds rather backwards and gives me "wet streets are causing rain" vibes, as if lots of government increase of the money supply won't cause demand for scarce resources and drive up their prices via sudden increases in demand with the newly available cash that can't be met by similar increases in supply.
OPEC.
Not that Reagan supported a war between Iraq and Iran, played both sides, caused OPEC to fall apart and flood the market dropping the price to $15 barrel.
Are you perhaps talking about the various kinds of debunked race "science" that never bothered to look at genomes when it could stop at skin color?
A) When talking about deregulation, Smith looks at laws, but he should be looking at agencies even more. Agencies after all do most of the day-to-day regulation. How can Smith seriously ignore things like appointing Anne Gorsuch to head the EPA in 1981? At the beginning, Reagan nominations were known for their hostility to regulation, and Smith would have done better to check whether this was actually true.
B) Arguing that Soviet military expenditure wasn't a big deal because they spent more in WW2 is crazy. Smith is comparing a peace-time spend to a total war spend!
C) Oil's role in USSR's collapse is well-known. Well known enough to have claims by Reagan partisans that he convinced the Saudis to keep prices low to pressure the USSR. Is this right? Very debatable. But it's directly related to the thesis of the article and Smith completely ignores this.
I am familiar with a much better expression of this lesson by, of all people, bill gates:
> We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction.
I lived through that period and none of it was any secret — quite the opposite, it was current affairs in the newspaper!
It’s fascinating how much the mainstream narrative deviates from “the facts” even with them available to anyone who cares to check.
[0] https://yourewrongabout.buzzsprout.com/
However, its pretty clear to me that the media's ability to assert certain opinions by asserting with more force is not conducive to a healthy long-term society.
Yes. 40 years of propaganda and hagiography of Reagan has left a significant minority of the US population in delusion about nearly anything political, including people who lived through the events in question.
Hell, a good subset of people are trapped in such an insanity bubble that people who had siblings die of polio in their youth suddenly decided vaccines are a giant conspiracy in 2021.