Ronald Reagan was a Better President than FDR

I have very much enjoyed discussing these issues with him, and would be happy to debate him again any time. Now, alas, I must explain why the content of his argument is in various parts untrue, exaggerated, fallacious, or plain contradictory. THE ECONOMY The above is the chart of Real GDP during the Roosevelt administration. It is simply dishonest to represent this graph as saying 'Real GDP was all over the place. ' It shows consistently strong growth, with one recession in 1937. My opponent has a right to his own opinions, ladies and gentlemen, but not to his own facts. As for the fall in the dollar, that it has happened is not contested, but that it has actually caused any harm to the American consumer has not been proven in the slightest. My opponents' own graph shows you that the value of the dollar has gone down consistently since FDR, including the Reagan era, right up to the present day. But real GDP per capita today is seven times what it was when Roosevelt took office! To argue that the average consumer has less purchasing power is prima facie ridiculous. He claims that the gold standard did not cause the depression, citing other contractionary policies, while ignoring the fact that the standard itself was part of the exact same contractionary set of ideas. The policies employed from '29 to '32 were contractionary in general - they caused the depression. FDR's were expansionary, they allowed recovery to begin. I have shown that unemployment was drastically reduced under Roosevelt. Pro tries to tell you that productivity was down. Take a look at this graph. As you can see, while productivity did fall in 1937 and after the end of WWII, even with the postwar contraction, the Industrial Production Index (IPI) was three times higher at the beginning of 1949 than it was when FDR took office. He also believes that in posting a simple assertion by a Libertarian thinker on the Minimum wage, he has provided evidence. Not so. I have supplied you with a study by the National Economic Council which found that the effect was minimal to non-existent. I have provided you with evidence that New Deal Programs employed black workers at a higher rate than their share of the population, and that it paid those workers more than the average black worker earned at the time. And again, he has not been able to counter the empirical evidence that unemployment drastically fell under Roosevelt. BEIRUT AND IRAN-CONTRANote how my opponent consistently tries to wriggle out of accepting any blame for Reagan for anything his administration did. "It was the UN's fault! It was the army's fault! It was the fault of his advisers! " Dear voters, Harry S Truman used to have a sign on his desk in the Oval Office that read 'The buck stops here. ' Pro is trying to make you believe the buck stops anywhere BUT the Oval Office. Don't fall for it. If Reagan had come out against deployment in Lebanon, or told his advisers that support to the Contras had to stop rather than directly telling them to continue it, these things wouldn't have happened. He was in favor of both, so they did. AIDSI demonstrated that the Reagan administration actively refused requests for funding for AIDS research and spent nine times as much money on Legionnaires' disease, which killed a tiny fraction of those who died from AIDS. Pro doesn't think a disease which killed nearly 48,000 Americans in the six years from 1981-1987 [1] was a big deal. I do. For the sake of comparison, the 13 years of American military presence in Vietnam cost 58,000 lives. [2] Alternatively, you might like to think of it as eleven 9/11s. Reagan failed, and once again Americans died because of it. COURT-PACKINGMy opponent asserted FDR acted illegally. This is untrue. Firstly, Congress has the right to pass whatever it wants, and the judges have the right to review it. It is not 'illegal' for Congress to pass Acts which then get struck down. Pro contends that FDR carried on with the laws in defiance of the court. This just flat-out isn't true. Roosevelt never ignored the decisions of the Supreme Court, although he at one point used rhetoric which implied he would. [3] What happened was that with the retirement of conservative Justices, the balance shifted towards the Court's liberal wing, and that Court then upheld the same kind of things which were being struck down by the more conservative Hughes Court. If, as my opponent contends, the law is what the Court says it is, he shouldn't have a problem with this. WWII AND THE SOVIET UNIONFor starters, my opponent's last point on World War II begins with the words 'I think,' therefore has no value whatsoever in a debate. However, even if it is true that the Soviets would have won on their own, he has provided no rebuttal to my point that greater Soviet domination of Europe would have been a bad thing, indeed he cannot counter this point without undermining the case he has built around Reagan's opposition to the USSR. If the USSR is evil, allowing it greater power would have been bad. If it is not, Reagan's already overrated contribution to bringing it down cannot count for anything. Now the idea that Reagan 'won' the Cold War is one of the most persistent and pernicious of fallacies to have infected our political discourse. Both sides have shown that the Soviet system contained inefficiencies that made its downfall inevitable. Reagan did not force the USSR to enter into a disastrous war in Afghanistan. He did not cause the costs of their 'Evil Empire' to rise year-on-year faster than Soviet GDP. He was not responsible for movements in the Soviet Satellites such as Solidarnosc which had already begun to seriously challenge the Communist system before Reagan took office. [4] And he certainly was not responsible for bringing into being the policies of Glasnost and Perestroika which opened up the Soviet Union to the outside world, and for the first time allowed for the free exchange of ideas and criticism of the government. Ladies and gentlemen, in so far as there is a president who deserves credit for ending the Cold War, his name is Gorbachev, not Reagan. So what have I shown you? I have clearly proven that the New Deal worked, and that FDR's economic record is superior to Reagan's. I have shown that on the great moral issues of their time, Civil Rights for Roosevelt, AIDS for Reagan, Roosevelt did what he could in the face of opposition within his party, while Reagan pandered to extremists at the cost of American lives. I have shown you that the Reagan administration supported serial human rights violators and sacrificed American lives for no gain in Lebanon. I have proven that my opponent's crediting of Reagan with ending the Cold War is not based in reality, and that there is a fundamental tension in his case between thinking ending the Cold War was a good thing, and that allowing the USSR to overrun Europe alone would also be acceptable. In other words, it is incredibly clear who the better president was. Voters of DDO, TEAR DOWN THIS MYTH! [1]. http://www.cdc.gov...[2]http://www.vhfcn.org...[3]http://blog.constitutioncenter.org...[4]http://www.historiasiglo20.org...