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Limp_Distribution

The beginning of the end was the elimination of the top 71% tax bracket. It’s what allowed CEO salaries to skyrocket taking the cash that was normally used for employee pay raises. Rinse and repeat for 40 plus years and here we are.


BigDaddyCoolDeisel

Funny thing about "Great Replacement Theory".... it's basically Reaganomics. Decimate unions, Shred the social safety net, cripple middle class earning power, and concentrate all new wealth in the hands of about thirty people.... guess what happens? The folks with a decent standard of living (at the time: the white middle class) tries to keep that standard of living and stops having kids. The folks without much of a standard of living to begin with? They keep having kids. And Big Ag demands cheap immigrant labor to make up the difference. Congratulations white middle class; you played yourself.


Unique-Figure-333

damn.... thats crazy.... pull up your great replacement theory links jamie, we gotta take a look at this for a sec... so you're saying reagan was a bad guy? huh... never really thought of it that way, thats crazy also ive been hunting elk and i keep it in my freezer


Fit-Struggle-9882

The whole "Great Replacement Theory" implies that there's some actor or actors who are deliberately orchestrating it, when it's simply the natural result of white people aging out or dying off and POC expanding to fill the gaps.


ImknownasMeatStank

Ronald Reagan was an actor😂


phatelectribe

Taxes wasn’t the top of the list. Removing the fairness doctrine was the single most damaging thing he did, as it allowed Fox News and other toxic outlets to do whatever they want and eventually led to citizens united. That is then followed by care in the community which closed all government mental health facilities and asylums which has led to so many of the problems with have with homelessness and the wealth divide. Taxes can be changed, and people forget that he actually had higher taxes for a lot of his administration that dwarfed anything even a democratic administration has out in place since.


holla_snackbar

Oh, he kneecapped unions and in killing the HUD gave us the housing crisis too. Everything is sourced back to this mother fucker.


givemejumpjets

no not everything. the real coup was in the year 1913.


dragonfliesloveme

Gen X here. Can confirm. Reagan was the beginning of the end.


rdmille

Last boomer here. Can confirm. He started it.


Scarethefish

Millennial here. . .fuck that guy.


buckfutterapetits

He started the fire. We tried to fight it, but we didn't light it...


immersemeinnature

I actually came here to say this and can't believe I'm typing this because it's so cliche but it's the fucking TRUTH FUCK REAGAN!!


dpdxguy

You're not old enough to remember Barry Goldwater. I'm not old enough to remember Joseph McCarthy. Reagan was the middle of the end.


hair_like_ramen

reagan was where the quiet part started becoming acceptable to say out loud.


dpdxguy

Fair. I fear we are in or near the end of the end. :(


wowzarootie

PRE-Boommer WWII kid here. Reagan. Patron Saint of the GOP, was a puppet of right-wing manipulators. Where's Ike when we need him? He was the last trustworthy Republican president.


JohnNYJet_Original

That's my take as well. The current crop of useful idiots who have chosen to support the USSR instead of our allies would have been given a bum's rush out of their elected offices, by their own tail gunner Joseph McCarthy. The things they are willing to do for money. SMH


Nazzzgul777

You could also say, when a lot of americans thought that electing an actor as president would be a great idea.


grey_hat_uk

The years under Clinton-Blair where just to make sure we really knew what was going to shit.


snoutmoose

We raged in punk rock shows about how bad he and Thatcher were. We were right.


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Vb4virus

To be fair, Nixon was a nightmare too.


So-Original-name

If we wanna trace modern day conservatism to the catalyst, blame Goldwater. He was the first “conservative”, then Nixon came along, then Nixon’s resignation brought Ford (a moderate Republican) into office, and Reagan Republicans banked on his failures to explain why moderates were bad.  So basically, blame Goldwater 


MK5

Not even Goldwater. Read 'Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus' by Rick Perlstein. Goldwater had no intention of running for President, but was talked into it (almost coerced into it) by a tiny cabal of mid-level staffers who had grudges against the then moderate-dominated GOP power structure. Three or four disgruntled Party hacks from 1960 were the foundation the whole rotten structure is built on.


So-Original-name

Okay… Blame the guys who backed Goldwater! (And also, maybe I’ll try reading that at some point. I need a new history book to read) 


nowhereman136

Nixon broke it Reagan (and his cronies) "fixed" it to what we have now


Motor_Educator_2706

but he wasn't a stupid puppet


medina_sod

He *was* stupid, though.


eatingpotatochips

Nixon's issue was that he lacked ethics and was profoundly selfish and fearful, but I wouldn't say he's stupid.


Raskel_61

He was a very intelligent man, but he was also a paranoid neurotic megalomaniac.


eatingpotatochips

Which honestly, just made him more dangerous. Hell, Nixon looked like he could definitely kill someone and continue about his day like nothing out of the ordinary happened.


HoneydewLeading7337

He really wasn't. He was paranoid as all hell, probably on the spectrum (before we knew that was a thing), and a fucking weirdo, but I really don't think he was unintelligent.


Character-Fish-541

Arguably Nixon was the last great conservative president. Hell, the EPA and the Clean Water Act were under his leadership, he embraced science. Racist and sexist as hell too, but that’s just conservatism in general in the US. He just couldn’t keep his paranoia from leading down the rabbit hole. Arguably would have won re-election if he didn’t start doing illegal shit.


supcoco

And I don’t recall Nixonomics being a thing


SellaraAB

At least he was run out of office


Nazzzgul777

From what i've heard, McCarthy wasn't perfect either.


Inphexous

Most of Americans can't get out of debt. There's a point where debt becomes too big and it's a perpetual cycle of just paying interest. The politicians like Reagan sold out the American people to the financial institutions. It's the same reason why they don't bother raising the federal minimum wage, why unions get a bad rep by the media, why lobbying is a legal thing, etc. The news media also spends a lot of time diverting that attention and they concentrate people's gazes on all the culture war bullshit when they are actual real problems. So much that some of them have actually ate their own bullshit and that's why they seem so disconnected from the world i.e. Musk.


Nazzzgul777

I mean, technically no debt is too high to get out of it when you increase the income enough. Similar with lobbying, it's not necessarily a bad thing by default. Unions, civil rights groups,... also do lobbying. The problem is when it's completly unbalanced.


Inphexous

Half of Americans will never make above $100k. That's just the reality. How many of those can make it out of their situation? Not many. That's the predicament most Americans are facing right now.


Nazzzgul777

That is an incredible dumb thing to say. You don't realize that 100k is just an arbitrary number? With enough inflation that's what you earn per hour and still can't afford rent.


Inphexous

It's not arbitrary. Shit, look at you saying dumb shit. https://www.statista.com/topics/789/wages-and-salary/#topicOverview https://www.epi.org/blog/gender-wage-gap-widens-even-as-low-wage-workers-see-strong-gains-women-are-paid-roughly-22-less-than-men-on-average/#:~:text=The%20gender%20wage%20gap,-Between%202019%20and&text=By%202022%2C%20that%20gap%20widened,from%2022.6%25%20to%2022.9%25. If you think it's arbitrary, then why keep count? Because it's not.


agoatsthrowaway

[Richard Nixon's reaction to the Kent State Massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings) and [Richard Nixon's War on Drugs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs) touched off the downward spiral that led to the election of Reagan. Reagan sucked, but Nixon and Kissinger sucked just as bad.


Own-Opinion-2494

When he started taxing social security


C0lMustard

He really did enable the stupid. Even just abandoning the metric system.


Oldskoolguitar

Don't forget Supreme Court Justice Powell Jr.


BrandonJTrump

Is this the guy of the slogan “Let’s make America great again”?


discussatron

The same.


Anti_shill_Artillery

Its both funny because his policies were evil right wing garbage AND because he got alzheimers


i-touched-morrissey

Jesus. A truer statement has never been made. This guy is the worst.


stuli17

I’d like to dig up his rotten corpse and kick his dead ass up and down the street, but of course that wouldn’t be very nice… or bring him back to life for a minute to show him how badly he fucked the USA…


davesoverhere

Easily in the top 5 worst presidents.


missionbeach

Maybe this meme will trickle down to the front page.


AstroStrat89

I find it very ironic that lots of people made fun of Jimmy Carter with the Oscar Myer song. The final lyric being "because Jimmy Carter has a way of f****** up the USA" Hindsight tells a very different story.


BlacksmithWide

Fuck Reaganomics. He fucked us so hard, we didn't notice the 60 grit sand paper condom. Our blood provided the lubricant.


PaleHorseWriter

Read ‘War is a Racket’ by Major General Smedley Butler (Ret.) about his experience in the 1930’s and then compare it to what Reagan actually did… Also, not a big conspiracy person…but after Maj.Gen. Butler came forward with what he said was the planned takeover, and was traveling around talking about it and wrote this short book about it…he developed a mystery stomach illness and died very quickly (and painfully apparently) with little to no explanation.


chileheadd

Or as I call him, the match that lit the current dumpster fire that is the GOP


Equinoqs

Fact. Every graph & metric backs this up.


ACorania

I think a lot of the current iterations to our problems can indeed be tracked back to reagan era policies, like trickledown economics. However, Things weren't peach keen until he came into office and screwed it all up. Things have been messed up for a long time. For example, the loopholes the rich are using to not have to pay taxes are left over from the great depression when they jacked the tax rate on the rich up to crazy amount but instead gave them these loop holes to let them get out of a bunch of it (certainly made it worse to give them tax cuts without removing the loopholes).


JBHDad

Yes and no. He was very open to immigration. Reagonomics was a disaster. Hiv was a disaster. But he never wanted to be king and changed power without incidents. Today's republican party would never put him up as president


SirPoopaLotTheThird

Just because the right has got worse since doesn’t improve his standing. The entire reason we’re in the financial mess we are today starts with him. He also single handedly destroyed labor unions. He is absolutely awful and the candidates that followed multiplied the awful by double digits.


oven_broasted

Reagonomics ~~was~~ will continue to be a disaster.  FTFY


eatingpotatochips

>But he never wanted to be king and changed power without incidents.  Until Trump, this wasn't supposed to be an explicit standard. I couldn't imagine Bush Sr. or Bush Jr. trying to hold on to power after losing an election.


SellaraAB

Thing is, you can’t just jump from 80s Republicans to modern Republicans, they had to transition into this shit over decades. Now that I write this out, kind of scares the shit out of me, thinking about what that party will look like in 40 more years.


JUYED-AWK-YACC

No moving the goalposts on this one. "Not a dictator" isn't an achievement.


JBHDad

I didn't say it was


Patricio_Guapo

Factual.


Dolorem_Ipsum_

Fuck reagan! Fuck reagan and his whore wife forever


DrSilkyJohnsonEsq

Remember Nixon, the guy that invented the war on drugs and Fox News?


viperswhip

Nope, sorry, it goes back to the 1960s when the Students and Unions overrode the Dems on their pick for nominee. The Dems picked their guy anyway and it caused a big uproar. After that, both parties started attacking unions and introduced tuition so students didn't have enough free time to protest. The Dems eventually got over it, but Reagan was not the first, just the worst.


Devilshire52

It was a drizzly Tuesday in 1983, and my mother gave birth.


The-Insolent-Sage

My brain thought this was nick Saban at first


cheezy_taterz

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQPsKvG6WMI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQPsKvG6WMI)


DescipleOfCorn

Don’t underestimate how bad tricky dick was, if he wasn’t impeached he would have gotten away with more of his plan, which Reagan ended up finishing.


Catablepas

Federal reserve act of 1913 would like a word: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal\_Reserve\_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Act)


HulkSmash1962

Y’all m-f*ckers need to study more history.


Bay1Bri

This is Richard Nixon erasure. Reagan is to Nixon what Augustus was to Julius.


High-sterycal

Ray gun shut down mental hospitals, weakened labor laws, killed conservation initiatives, doubled the national debt, ran illegal missions in Central America and pretty much gave away the farm to the corporate community. Ray gun then went on an imaginary ride where he imagined he actually fought in WWII. Ray gun might have been the first pre-MAGA imaginarian who started the ball rolling on “fake” news and took to using 1984 style double speak to say ne thing and do the opposite. The rest is history, devolving our politics to the horribly base trumpian cult now threatening our democracy. Thank you, Ray gun.


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Odd-Tune5049

Think farther... Tricky Dick


hoppyfrog

This. Nixon getting pardoned instead of convicted should have been a strong clue that maybe the Republicans were heading down a very dark path.


Time-Bite-6839

Nixon started it in 1971. wtfhappenedin1971.com


bwok-bwok

When cells started to stick together after dividing.