Ronald Reagan was a better President than Barack Obama

Foreign PolicyThen what you are saying isn't relevant since this is a debate about policy. It should not matter what the media does, Obama should breast up and continue on with what he wants to do. I will note that these arguments about the media are also irrelevant since this does not regard to public policy. I will note that even your source says the military build-up the Soviet Union did cause it do fall apart and one of the reasons the Afghan War was so bad was because the US supported the terrorist groups against the USSR. Also, remember that economically the reason the US was so dominant over the USSR was because of the economic policies Reagan put into place. You can't just have a good military, you need a good economy to support it and that is what Reagan did. The Soviet economy was unable to outcompete the American one. Your source mentions Afghanistan and the military build-up to, which you know Reagan contributed to. Remember that Soviet military strategy was also to export communism around the globe. With Reagan that all stopped. The Cold War is not just about defeating the USSR, but bringing in as much democracy as possible. Remember that Reagan was able to win the favorable terms of the INF Treaty:"Since the treaty involved the destruction of four times as many warheads on the Soviet as on the American side, experts agreed that the INF Treaty constituted the most favorable terms ever obtained by the United States in an arms agreement." [1]And if Thatcher does not please you, how about Henry Kissinger:"It was Ronald Reagan's presidency which marked the turning point." This was Kissinger's thoughts on the Cold War. The USSR was winning in the 1970s, but then under Reagan a turning point came and it lost from Reagan. [2]Or perhaps Gorbachev himself:"I am not sure what happened would have happened had he [Reagan] not been there." This was Gorbachev to the History Channel in 2002. [3]Soviet troops and aide were reduced throughout the world as the Soviets had to full back from their many fronts. At the same time, calculations have given that the Reagan doctrine cost the USSR some $85 to $125 billion that was used in their domestic economy to their military. That is a clear waver from economic problems and contributed to the fall of the USSR. [1]The world is safer now, and the problems in the Middle East are far smaller than that of the problems we have against the zenith Soviet Union. Keep in mind that al-Qaeda, the group causing terrorism on the USA, was not doing so until after Reagan left office. Thus his administration did not have direct effects on it.Could you provide a primary source of Reagan's knowing of arm sales. Also, there have been many times aides and Cabinet secretaries have tried to undermine the president. If you go back to when John Adams was president you would see Jefferson. Under Andrew Jackson you would see Calhoun. You could also look at Grant and Harding. The point is sometimes people in the White House do things and make sure the president does not know. This was the case of Reagan as the Tower Commision reported. [4]Yugoslavia is not the only example, but it is a good one. Remember that all these wars occured while Yugoslavia existed and it only fell in 2003. Most of those wars you mention occured in the 1990s while Yugoslavia controlled most of the western Balkans. However, do you here much out of the Balkans now? No because the situation is better. Another example is the Austro-Hungarian Empire. An empire of many diverse peoples, that eventually fell because it could not stay together under one government. Now that region is a much better place because it got the territory it wanted. ISIS has not said they wanted as much territory as possible, they have set their borders clearly: They don't want an empire, for some reason you may have forgotten that ISIS stands for Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. I still stand that there is less violence when countries break up for ethnic reasons than there is when united together. For more you can also see the Soviet Union, which was swollen with so many peoples but was not united. People want their own lands and then they will be happy. Why would the Nazis not have and the USSR would have? They were basically the same totalitarian regimes with few differences. Anyone would tell you that. It is now economic common sense that countries which flirt with genocide (11,000,000 people died under Nazi rule, over 40,000,000 under USSR) and coontrol whole economies and overbloat their military budgets and enact practical slave labor will fall. Nazi Germany's fall was inevitable:"When a government transitions to a more interventionist role, transforming a free economy to a command economy, it thrives on a one-time extraction of wealth from formerly independent, private companies. But like any sudden wealth tax, aggrandizement by a dictator diminshes the incentives of the private sector to create wealth going forward. The Nazi economy existed for barely twelve years. We can only speculate that its statis model would have slowed and imploded. Howerver, a longer-lived statist economy did exist worth remembering - the Soviet Union." [5]They were basically the same country. Again, South Africa was a case of caution. Thatcher understodd this more than anyone else (South Africa being part of the Commonwealth):"Mrs Thatcher understood South Africa, like every other regional problem, as just another battleground in the global struggle between Western freedom and Soviet Communism. She regarded white South Africa, despite aparthied, as part of the West - Christian, capitalist, subject to the rule of law and in priciniple democratic - threatened by a Soviet-backed black liberation movement which aimed to destabilise the economy, destroy those liberal traditions and move South Africa into the Soviet camp." [6]We have to understand South Africa as a very careful situation in the times of the Cold War. Thatcher knew full well what would happen if the world rapidly rushed to sanctions while violent uprisings broke loose in the summer of 1985 there. She, working with Reagan, delayed sanctions as much as possible while privately writing to South Africa asking for Nelson Mandela's release and an end to apartheid. It must be understood that from there perspective, and indeed true, the USSR did want to expand their influence to more British Commonwealth nations. [6]Finally, who says that the UN always has a correct judgement in what it does? Going into Grenada to save Americans while defeating the communists was the right thing to do.Economic PolicyNo matter what can be said that is in Obamacare, remember that it still costs an insane amount of money at a time when we are in far too much debt. This has happened with past civilizations, eventually leading them to fall apart. Those costs are very high and the taxes do little to offset it. [7]"An astonishing 46 percent of responding primary care physicians claim they would leave or try to leave medicine as a result of ObamaCare, gravely exacerbating the existing shortage of primary care doctors (according to the American Academy of Family Physicians, the number of U.S. medical school students choosing primary care has already dropped 52 percent since 1997)." [8]Regulation on the financial sector increased as I have previously cited from $1.9 billion in 2000 to $2.3 billion in 2008. How can financial regulations prevent recessions when they increased and yet did not prevent it. Most people unanimously agree that the Fed had a contribution to the crisis with its low interest rate and easy credit policies. [9]I will note the recent Romer-Romer study found the best tax rate to be 33%. Even so, the higher rate studies don't look into the possibility of tax shelters the rich would hide their capital in as they do when taxes are too high. I have cited previously that incomes went up for everyone during the 1980s and who hates more income?Remember that our unemployment rate is over 6% and raising the minimum wage would likely damage job creation, but this should not be debated since raising it to $10.10 has not become a policy, so debating it would be a waste of time.ConclusionI have proven my case for these reason: tax cuts and limited spending greatly increased economic growth, more money meant incomes rose for everyone and people could afford more products, the USSR needed to be defeated faster and Reagan accelerated it by increasing the military budget so high the USSR could not compete, he rolled back dictatorships in favor of democracies, several foreign leaders and diplomats agree that Reagan caused the end.Sources1. D'Souza, Dinesh. Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader. New York: Free, 1997. Print.2. Kissinger, Henry. Diplomacy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. Print.3. Gaffney, Dennis, and Peter Gaffney. The Seven-day Scholar: The Presidents: Exploring History One Week at a Time. New York: Hyperion, 2012. Print.4. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu...5. Hubbard, R. Glenn., and Tim Kane. Balance: The Economics of Great Powers from Ancient Rome to Modern America. Simon & Schuster, 2013. Print.6. Campbell, John. The Iron Lady: Margaret Thatcher, from Grocer's Daughter to Prime Minister. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.7. "Congressional Budget Office." Updated Estimates of the Effects of the Insurance Coverage Provisions of the Affordable Care Act, April 2014. 8. Paterson, Matt. "ObamaCare Would Drive Doctors Out of Business."Nationalcenter.org. National Policy Analysis, Mar. 2010. Web. 18 July 2014. 9. Hadar, Leon T. "Did Regulations Cause Current Crisis?" Cato.org. Cato Insitute, 7 Aug. 2009. Web. 18 July 2014.10. Romer, Christina and David Romer. "American Economic Review 100 (June 2010): 763""801 Http://www.aeaweb.org... Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates Based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks." American Economic Review, June 2010. Web.