Ronald Reagan hurt America, more than he helped it.

First off, let me say that I would love to debate you on any economic topic of your choice. It'd be a savory opportunity to debate an intelligent socialist. Let me start by addressing your claim that Reagan's many foreign policy blunders impacts Americans to this day with one word: whose fault is that? The United States did not have to send troops against Saddam in 1991. The United States did not have to station troops in Saudi Arabia following the war, nor did the the US have to prop up the brutal Kuwaiti regime. The United States did not have to send troops into Somalia. The United States did not have to invade Afghanistan or Iraq following 9/11. My point is that these actions, which I would argue have contributed far more to the impacts of Middle Eastern problems felt by average Americans today, were not the inevitable result because of Ronald Reagan's policies. I'll use South-East Asia as a parallel. The United States supported the brutal South Vietnamese dictatorship for two decades. Eventually a point was reached where the United States removed its military presence from the region. Today the United States trades with Vietnam. Am I going to argue that Lyndon Johnson is responsible for that? I challenge your claim that the positive impacts Reagan had on the economy were felt for only a short period of time. Remember what the economy was like before Reagan's term in office; a decade of non-stop inflation and unemployment. We're talking double digit inflation and double-digit unemployment for multiple years. Today a "recession" is 6% unemployment and a 3% inflation rate. That's peanuts compared to the 70's. Because of Reagan's actions, the American economy has regained the flexibility it lost during the massive expansion of government that picked up in the 60's and crashed in the 70's. Reagan certainly did use his veto pen to counter congressional domestic spending, 78 times. 9 of those vetoes were overridden. Moreover, your point about tax cuts decreasing revenue is demonstrably false. After lowering top bracket rates, overall tax revenues from the top bracket increased as did their overall burden. An illustrative graph can be found here: http://www.house.gov.... The tax cuts, rather than raising the deficit, should have lowered the deficit. The dramatic increase in the federal deficit can be traced primarily to Reagan's push for increased military spending. This spending was wasteful and did not help bring down the Soviet Union (The command economy did). That clarified, I'll explain why deficit spending isn't bad in the ways you say it is (And the real reason it's bad). When the federal government runs deficits, it prints out t-bonds. Future taxpayers will have more and more of their money eaten up every year making interest payments. However, future generations will also inherit these very valuable t-bonds. The harm in deficit spending (And with all government programs) is that it misallocates resources from the private sector to whatever the government is spending money on in the present. Moreover, t-bonds crowd out private bonds, lowering the amount of money able to be invested in businesses. However, to say that deficit spending steals resources from future generations is just wrong. Finally, a clarification. I am not going to argue that Ronald Reagan is responsible for globalization. What Reagan did do was contribute to the world-wide ideological shift away from government planning and towards markets. Ask Lech Walesa who was most inspirational in his fight against central planning and he'll tell you: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Only countries that opened up their markets have gained from globalization, and those policies arose in no small part from the ideological shift spearheaded by Reagan and Thatcher.