Ronald Reagan was a better President than Barack Obama

I have decided to divide my case into two main parts. One is economic policy and the other is foreign policy. To me, these two policies mean the most when comparing Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. I want it to be remembered that my case is to prove that President Reagan was better, in terms of public policy, than President Obama. Here we go! Ronald ReaganI. Economic PolicyReagan's economic policy when he came into office was a supply-side strategy for the economy as promoted by economists like Arthur Laffer. Reagan believed that there needed to be large tax reductions to help the economy grow. At the same time, the growth of the government in domestic spending needed to be limited. A restrictive monetary policy would be used to stabilize the dollar and stop inflation. When this occured the economy was supposed to boom, which it did succesfully. It is important to understand how the tax cuts were implemented, as Dr. Laffer explains here:"Looking at the cumulative effects of the ERTA in terms of tax (calendar) years, the tax cut reduced tax rates by 1.25 percent through the entirety of 1981, 10 percent through 1982, 20 percent through 1983, and the full 25 percent through 1984. " [1]It was one of the greatest economic booms in our nation's history. Real GDP growth from 1981 to 1989 was 3.61 percent. Since Kennedy/Johnson, the industrial productivity of the nation had been declining and by the time of the Jimmy Carter years it was 0.6 percent. Reagan shattered that industrial decline with his pro-growth plan. Industrial productivity increased to 1.5 percent during his presidency. There was 92 months of economic expansion during the Reagan/Bush years. [2,3]Obviously this meant more money in the hands of the American people. Median household income increased by $4,000 during the Reagan years, a stark reversal from the $1,500 decline during the Carter years. Nearly 17 million jobs were created in the United States. [3]II. Foreign PolicyIt's hard for anyone to understand why Reagan's foreign policy was bad, because it was one of the best doctrines to ever exist. It brought and peaceful and glorious victory to the end of the Cold War as the Soviet Union fell apart. It all thanks to more money for defense spending, which rocketed upwards for American freedom! He had three strategies:1. Military Strategy - When President Reagan entered office, military morale was low and so was the pay. President Carter had cut a lot of programs in the military. Under the Reagan Administration, military spending skyrocketed in the crusade against communism. This included the famous SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) programs and several over and covert missions to aid anti-communists guerrilla forces in Central America, South America, Africa, and Afghanistan.2. Economic Strategy - Yes, Reaganomics helped win the Cold War. The recovering economy helped President Reagan's military buildup. The free market capitalist United States was too much for the USSR which had an its inefficient command-directed communist economic system.3. Political Strategy - Politics played a role to in defeating the reds. With a strong ally in British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, President Reagan launched a global political form of blitzkrieg on the USSR and other communist political leaders. The reds had seriously underestimated the American president and saw him as a "warmonger". Together, these strategies defeated the USSR and by January 1989 when President Reagan left office the USSR was in great trouble. In 1991, the USSR would collapse. Soviet Head of State Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of perestroika (re-structuring) and glasnost (openness) proved too little, too late in order to preserve communism and the USSR. Gorbachev told the History Channel in 2002, "I don't know what would have happened had [Reagan] not been there. " [4,5]Barack ObamaI. Economic PolicyThis has been one of the worst economic recoveries in recent history, especially when compared to the recovery of Ronald Reagan. Obama's stimulus plan was a total disaster that failed to spark large economic growth. It has also injected more taxes on the wealthy with the expiring of the Bush tax cuts. During the Reagan years 16.1 million jobs were gained to the U. S. economy. Now to be fair to Obama, who hasn't finished his presidency, we need to scale back to Reagan's first six years in office and compare that with Obama's first six years. We can easily do that by looking at this graph: At no point in history has Obama's job record exceeded Reagan's jobs record. Time is running out Obama and he will obviously not catch up to the economic superiority of the Reagan years. I can see fifty years from now people talking about how badly Obama's presideny was economically. This is especially true when you look at median household income:"The income of the median U. S. household was $51,900 in 2013, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday. That’s essentially unchanged from 2012, after adjusting for inflation, and is 8 percent lower than in 2007, before the recession began. Median income hasn’t shown a statistically significant increase since the recession ended in 2009. " [6]What about real GDP growth? Going back to the statistics, real GDP grew by 2.21 percent from 2009 to 2014. When looking at Reagan from 1981 to 1986, real GDP grew by 3.50 percent. Clearly the Reagan economic record is much better than the Obama economic record. [2]Kahn further writes about the disaster of tax increases:"The current administration has ignored historical evidence that high tax rates on saving and investment over time erode the growth of productive capital, leading to lower economic growth and job creation. It also has stubbornly relied on outdated Keynesian economic models. Hence it continues in a fantasy that higher tax rates on upper-income earners will generate significant revenue. The job hopes of many are too important to be nailed to the cross of this economic ideology. " [7]High tax rates never work. We paying the price right now. II. Foreign PolicyObama's main opponents, ISIS, are far weaker than the mighty Soviet Union, yet Obama does little. We have no real strategy against ISIS. It's a disaster: "The Obama administration and the Pentagon have counseled patience. Losing Ramadi was a “setback,” the White House said, and not one worth setting our “hair on fire,” according to spokesman Josh Earnest. Washington says it will ramp up the pace of training Iraqi troops—training, critics note, that’s been going on for years in the aftermath of the 2003 U. S. invasion. But interviews with military and political officials and analysts in Iraq—both Iraqi and foreign—paint a darker picture. The grim fact confronting the administration and its international partners is that the degrade and destroy campaign, as currently constituted, is failing. And there are “really no good options going forward,” as it struggles with how to counter ISIS, says Sajad Jiyad, Iraq analyst and senior researcher at the Al-Bayan Center for Studies and Planning in Baghdad. " [8]With his lack of stepping up, the entire world is in a very dangerous position. In comparison, Reagan left America in a perfectly safe position, but while the United States stands and does nothing ISIS wins the war: "The U. S. campaign in Iraq since 2014 has been a study in too little, too late half-measures that do not actually save American resources in the long term. Instead, Washington just ends up needing to deepen its investment anyway – only, each time its allies trust it a little less, thousands more Iraqis have died, and irreplaceable communities and cultural artifacts have been lost forever. Time is decidedly not on the side of the United States. As then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told me in March 2014, the Iraqi government had been requesting U. S. airstrikes and Special Forces assistance against the Islamic State since the end of 2013. The U. S. unwillingness to act then did not save it anything: Its Iraqi ally collapsed, and now it has been forced into another military campaign. " [9]Concluding, Obama's presidency has been far worse than Reagan's presidency. Sources1. Laffer, Arthur. "The Laffer Curve: Past, Present, and Future. " Heritage. org. The Heritage Foundation, 1 June 2004. Web.2. Willamson, Samuel H. "Annualized Growth Rate and Graphs of Various Historical Economic Series," MeasuringWorth, 2014.3. Niskanen, William, and Stephen Moore. "Cato Institute Policy Analysis No. 261: Supply-Side Tax Cuts and the Truth about the Reagan Economic Record. " (n. d. ): n. pag. Cato. org. Cato Institute, 22 Oct. 1996. Web.4. Gaffney, Dennis and Peter Gaffney. The Seven Day-Scholar: The Presidents. 2012.5. Morelock, Jerry D. "Ronald Reagan's Cold War. " Armchair General IX.5 (2012): 18-19. 6. Casselman, Ben. "Five Years Of Recovery Haven't Boosted The Median Household Income. " DataLab. ESPN, 16 Sept. 2014. Web. 24 June 2015.7. Rahn, Richard W. "Tax Cuts and Revenue: What We Learned in the 1980s. "WSJ. The Wall Street Journal, 25 Sept. 2010. Web. 24 June 2015.8. Powell, Bill. "Is ISIS Winning? " Newsweek. Newsweek LLC, 02 June 2015. Web. 24 June 2015.9. Knights, Michael. "Doubling Down on a Doubtful Strategy. " Foreign Policy. Grahams Holding Company, 05 June 2015. Web. 24 June 2015.