Just because something happened at that time does not mean there was a causal link. That's a very important lesson about history. The fact is, many things brought an end to the Soviet Union, most of which had to do with the contradictions and inefficiencies of Soviet governmental and economic policies. President Reagan's insistence on keeping the SDI program and his pouring trillions of dollars into the U.S. military nudged things along, but they weren't deciding factors or even particularly significant in the context of ending the Soviet experiment. The significant factors included a lack of consumer choices; popular cynicism regarding Government's ability to reform itself; the suppression of national identities; a prolonged and senseless war in Afghanistan; and President Gorbachev's inability, or unwillingness, to exert the political control necessary to keep the country together.screech339 said:
As for the economic changes that occurred during President Reagan, it is true, he grew the debt by over $11 trillion in eight years. That had a tremendous impact on the economy, some of it in a positive way. This was bound to happen. But he also had a tremendous negative impact on the economy, the consequences of which Americans are living with to this day; including wage stagnation, lack of a safety net for the poor, wealth disparities, one in six families going hungry every month, corporate greed gone mad, busted unions, shifting the tax burden onto the backs of the poor and working class, and myriad other consequences, all traced back to the Reagan Administration.
Yes, President Reagan won 49 of the 50 states in the Electoral College, during his reelection campaign. But he only won the election with 59% of the popular vote, not nearly the landslide the Electoral College made it out to be. And this was yet another case of the Democrats selecting a poor candidate, Walter Mondale, to run against him; and selecting a woman as a vice president, something few Americans were ready for at the time, and even those who were ready for a woman were turned off by the media reported financial scandals of Geraldine Ferraro and her husband during the campaign. It also did not help that Walter Mondale gave a speech on the morning of Election Day, as the polls opened up, that essentially conceded the election to President Reagan.screech339 said:
President Reagan's popularity with the electorate was largely driven by his warm welcome of the Dixiecrats into the Republican Party. (The Dixiecrats were the Southern Democrats that the Democratic Party lost when they passed The Civil Rights Act under President Johnson.) President Reagan pandered to these voters, as well as to religious conservatives, by embracing policies that he would not, and could not, pass (e.g., prayer in the schools, anti school desegragation, anti abortion, kicking (black) "welfare queens" off public assistance). He was popular with conservative and white voters who felt they were losing their place in America. But that does not mean he was popular with progressives, or even a majority of Democrats. And while he was a personable and likable person, his policies were often despised by the left. For example, he did absolutely nothing about the HIV/AIDS epidemic raging through the country, did not spend a cent on it, and did not allow the government to address the epidemic in any way -- he was virulently anti-gay (even his own gay son, Ron, talked openly about this). He crushed the air traffic controllers union, firing all of them. He eliminated large swathes of the anti-poverty programs put in place in the 1960s. He cut funding to cities. He lowered taxes on the wealthy. He reversed the previous policy of keeping unemployment low, and instead focused on keeping inflation low, which resulted in wage stagnation. He changed investment regulations making it easy for corporate raiders to takeover corporations just to get at their large pension funds; after takeover, the corporations were dismantled and the component parts sold off, but the raiders kept hundreds of billions of dollars in pension funds -- their profit, leaving the workers who had earned those pensions, and their widows, out in the cold. He cut funding for higher education, and oversaw the beginning of the Federal Government turning a profit on student loans at students' expense.
Is this the same Bill Clinton who tried to open military service for homosexuals but ended up signing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and "The Defense of Marriage Act", both of which set gay rights back by at least a decade, so he could remain popular with conservative special interest groups? Is this the same President Clinton who was supportive of the black civil rights movement, but ended up supporting "tough on crime laws" that focused primarily on the incarceration of blacks, so that by the end of his Presidency one in three black men were in prison, on probation or on parole, in order to win reelection by playing the racist card as an appeal to white voters?screech339 said:
I am no President Obama fan -- I find him far too conservative and right wing for my taste. Excepting social issues, which are essentially "divide and conquer" issues, he is, in my opinion, the most conservative U.S. president since World War II. But I cannot help but be outraged by the racially motivated animosity his presidency has stirred up in America. The last U.S. President to be treated this badly by the opposition party was President Abraham Lincoln. There is plenty to object to in President Obama's policies and actions, without having to resort to the faux, racially motivated criticisms that have been repeated over and over in the USA. So far, screech339, all you have done is mindlessly repeat those criticisms; I can only hope that you do not also share the racial hatred that has motivated that speech in the USA.
