I know, I know, all of you conservatives are too blinded to even KNOW
when you are duped by president who wasn't really that great. he was
good at ACTING like a president, practicing scripts for speeches for a
week before giving them. He ACTED as president exclusively. Anything
that went before the public was scripted, and practiced before hand.
Even his funeral is a well scripted act, 300 pages worth! But alas,
below is what Reagan REALLY did for our country:

David Lazarus
Wednesday, June 9, 2004



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Ronald Reagan may have been a good and decent man.

As president, though, Reagan pursued policies that were short-sighted,
reckless and, for many, hurtful. His economic legacy is one of
deplorable disregard for the consequences of his actions, and the
ramifications of Reagan's decisions remain with us to this day.

I'll focus here on just three issues: soaring budget deficits,
homelessness and AIDS.

On the matter of deficits, Reagan nearly tripled the gap between the
amount of money the federal government took in and the amount it
spent. He did this by cutting tax rates by an average 25 percent,
while aggressively increasing defense spending.

In 1981, shortly after taking office, Reagan lamented "runaway
deficits" that were then approaching $80 billion, or about 2.5 percent
of gross domestic product. Within only two years, however, his
policies had succeeded in enlarging the deficit to more than $200
billion, or 6 percent of GDP.

"It was an experiment," said Alan Auerbach, a professor of economics
at UC Berkeley. "No one before Reagan had ever run such huge deficits
during peacetime. He showed that you could smile and tell everyone not
to worry and, politically, no one will call you to account."

This lesson clearly wasn't lost on the current occupant of the White
House, who has followed the Reagan economic playbook virtually step by
step in taking a budget surplus and turning it into a deficit this
year of more than $520 billion, or 4.5 percent of GDP.

Runaway deficits

But runaway deficits do have consequences. They can lead to higher
interest rates, exacerbate high debt-servicing costs and cause funding
to dry up for important social programs, such as education and health
care.

"It was up to the first President Bush, the loyal soldier, to clean up
the mess by raising taxes, and he didn't get re-elected because of
it," Auerbach observed. "Clinton also had to raise taxes because of
Reagan."

Over time, the Reagan deficit became the Clinton surplus. We may not
be as fortunate, though, in our efforts to sweep away the current Bush
deficit. The looming retirement of millions of Baby Boomers, Auerbach
noted, will soon place a huge burden on government coffers.

"We recovered from the Reagan deficit because we were able to raise
taxes and cut spending," he said. "We won't be able to do a quick fix
this time because of the impending collapse of Social Security and
Medicare."

Homelessness, meanwhile, is something we definitely can do something
about -- and are, in the form of innovative programs like supportive
housing, which gets people off the streets and into the care they
require.

When homelessness first became a national issue, however, the Reagan
administration all but turned a blind eye to the problem. Federal
expenditures for low-cost housing plunged during Reagan's watch from
$32 billion in 1981 to just $7 billion in 1987.

At the same time, funding was slashed for a variety of social
services, including public health, drug rehab and food stamps --
programs that were relied upon by the thousands of mentally ill people
who'd been released from state facilities as a cost-cutting move.

Reagan was asked in a 1988 interview, shortly before Christmas, what
he thought of the homeless people sleeping just across the street from
the White House in Lafayette Park.

"There are always going to be people," he replied. "They make it their
own choice for staying out there."

A couple of years later, Reagan's daughter, Patti Davis, commented on
her fear that she might be recognized by a homeless person while out
jogging.

"What would I say if I were asked why I didn't talk to my father, or
argue with him, about this national tragedy?" she wrote in Parade
magazine. "How do you argue with someone who states that the people
who are sleeping on the streets of America 'are homeless by choice?' "

Last but not least, AIDS. Reagan is not to blame for this horrific
epidemic, or for the high cost to the nation in terms of lost lives
and lost productivity. What he is responsible for is the government's
callous failure to respond to this crisis in a timely manner.

Reagan famously did not utter the word AIDS in public until 1987. He
did precious little to arrest the spread of HIV, the virus that causes
AIDS, in the early 1980s, and limited the amount of official resources
dedicated to what was perceived by his administration as an affliction
exclusively of the gay community.

Decision-making power

"If this was affecting straight men and women at the time, nobody
would have sat around," said Rene Durazzo, international program
director for the nonprofit San Francisco AIDS Foundation. "Reagan had
the power to make world- changing decisions. Because he failed to do
so, we lost hundreds of thousands of people."

The Centers for Disease Control estimates that nearly 1 million
Americans are now infected with HIV.

"We've spent billions of dollars because of the epidemic and faced
millions in lost productivity," Durazzo said. "All this could have
been minimized if the Reagan administration had just acted sooner."

Ronald Reagan is justifiably being praised this week for having
restored a sense of pride to Americans. This was a considerable
achievement.

But his legacy didn't end there. Reagan needs to be remembered as well
for his other deeds (or lack thereof). And, for posterity if nothing
else, he needs to be held accountable.