I would disagree, there are still many historians who are torn about him, while some praise him for foreign relations others also point out he was the one who really started our huge national debt(yes carter had a small one), but Reagan ballooned it and started some of the problems we are still coping with today, the "me" decade hurt.
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Okay you are the president of the United States of America. You have a choice, when you took office inflation was in double digits and spiraling up. You faced massive unemployment, and interest rates at 21%. This was what President Reagan faced when he took office because President Carter did nothing to ever look like he was trying to solve the problems that caused it.
He undertook a massive 30% tax cut allowing more Americans to have more money. In a sense he gave us all a pay raise. Because President Carter had cut the military budget so badly we could not fight a war or rescue hostages, the next thing was to rebuild the military and pay them. (Personal experience, one of my corporals was married and living on base, because he was in the military he is forbidden to hold another job. The only way he could feed his family was to apply and receive welfare. Think of it you are a government employee and you are eligible for welfare and food stamps!) (Personal experience, the budget was slashed so badly by Mr. Carter ( a man I voted for the first time) we were only allowed one tank of gas per vehicle per month. We were only allowed 20 rounds of blank ammunition per man per month for training. An M-16 A-1 rifle magazine holds 28 rounds of ammunition and fires at a rate of 700 rounds per minute. Live ammunition was so scarce that we only had enough money for our yearly requalification roughly three hundred rounds per year per man plus what we used on guard duty. We did not have enough money in the budget for cleaning supplies and was forced to buy our own toilet paper, and we had to chip in to buy floor cleaner and comet.) This was the thanks from a grateful nation for our service.
Just to get our military up and running we needed massive funding because for those four years of Mr. Carter we did not buy replenishment and replacement parts as needed so our equipment was falling apart. There were times there was not enough money in the budget to repair water heaters so in the winter time I had to take cold showers, and some days the heater went out so the barracks was not much warmer than it was outside. Our military was rotting from the inside out. Then the hostage crisis occurred and the American people that cheered our budget cuts demanded we go in and get our people out of Iran by force. The disastrous results are history.
The tax cuts helped jump start the economy, the military purchases that seemed excessive got people jobs. So yes, Mr. Carter had a small national debt, and on paper it looks nice but in reality the nation was in dire striates, our military could barely defend us from a sneak attack from Haiti. Double digit unemployment, crushing taxes, double digit inflation, double digit interest rates and people wondering if their next pay check will be their last as businesses laid off people to stay afloat or went out of business all together.
While Mr. Reagan had a massive national debt it was paid off in under 20 years and we had 93 months of economic growth.
President Bush’s opponents whine about the record unemployment of 4.9% that has gone all the way up to 5.7% while forgetting that the lowest President Clinton had was 5.8% and it was touted as the lowest unemployment in history.
July 1979 inflation was at 11.2% four years later under Mr. Reagan inflation was at 2.4% for the same month. The average rate of inflation for Mr. Carter was 11.2% but four years later under new leadership the average rate was 3.2% this means things were not as expensive and people can afford to buy things that keep other people employed. Never during either President Reagan or Bush did the inflation rate get larger than 5% on average for any given year once he started to bring the rate down it stayed down.
When Mr. Clinton was in office his last years interest rates were at 8% Mr. Bush demanded a tax cut and interest rates dropped to 6% this is big because the last time interest rates were at 6% President Kennedy was in office. Two years later interest rates fell to 5% they have been going up but wars will do that, it has gotten as high as 8% and is currently at 7%.
I could not find a historical chart of interest rates to compare Carter and Reagan but I lived through it and it went down not up or stagnated.
I wrote an article showing how it was not the me generation of the 80’s that was to fault it was the me generation of the 60’s that was the cause. When the liberals demanded we stop teaching ethics in colleges, stop teaching the mandatory theology classes to get a business degrees we created the mess in the 80’s. Guess what? You now have to take ethics again because we stopped teaching it and the reason for teaching the class slapped us in the face 20 years later when those kids became business leaders with no ethical or moral compass.
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