Ronald Reagan was a Better President than FDR

Before I get into my substantives, which will largely deal with a comparison of foreign policy and moral leadership, a few points of rebuttal not covered directly by said substantives. GOLD STANDARD: Yes, the value of the dollar dropped. Despite using emotive language like 'killed' my opponent has presented no evidence at all why a weaker currency is necessarily a bad thing. The gold standard was part of the problem that led to the depression. No country in the world is still on the gold standard today, and there's a reason for that - it's insane. As Robert Samuelson explains, "It's hard to imagine a more sure-fire way of creating uncertainty and destroying confidence. "[1] Why is this? Because, as Andrew Leonard puts it, "Adhering to the gold standard severely limits government flexibility in responding to what"s actually happening, economically, in the world. " [2] Floating currency is better than fixed, gold-backed currency, therefore his argument falls. MINIMUM WAGE: My opponent again asserts that this was bad without providing any evidence. The research on the link between minimum wages and unemployment is fiercely contested (and probably worthy of a debate in itself) but suffice to say, there is plenty of reason to believe the link between minimum wage rises and unemployment is a myth [3] and the consensus among experts so far as there can be considered to be one is that if an employment effect exists, it is extremely small. Therefore, any small rise in unemployment would be more than counterbalanced by the extra money in low-skilled workers' pockets. But more than this, my opponent has not contested the evidence I provided to show that unemployment fell by 59% during FDR's first two terms (because it's empirical fact). Therefore any attempt to suggest that FDR's record on unemployment counterbalances his civil rights record fails the smell test. GDP: my opponent asserts that GDP was 'all over the place' during the 1930s. This is untrue. It was going down pre-FDR, and under FDR it grew every year but one, in many of those years by huge amounts. [4] To quote Richard Freeman, [5] "Roosevelt"s approach was a total success. It absolutely defeated the Depression, and went far beyond. " In the one year the economy contracted, it was precisely because FDR slashed New Deal programs in an attempt to balance the budget. IRAN-CONTRA: Yes, it cannot conclusively be proven Reagan knew about it. But I have proven that Reagan was personally hugely supportive of the Contras, despite their terrible human rights record. Plus, the idea that the President was unaware that his own National Security Council had turned into an arms-trafficking ring requires a degree of frankly criminal negligence on his part that is only barely preferable to the alternative of deliberate lawlessness. On Beirut, Pro tries to claim that because members of the army screwed up to cause the deaths, it wasn't the President's fault. Literally any time someone in the military dies, someone else has screwed up, and it's not usually the President directly doing it. Reagan took the decision to put those troops in a theater where people would obviously try to kill them with no clear goal. That's on him. That's what being 'Commander-in-Chief' means. Are we supposed to believe that Reagan had no way of knowing that while in a war zone, people might try to kill these Americans? COURT-PACKING Pro claims that the Court struck down 'illegal laws. ' Hogwash. It took narrow, partisan majorities to disallow many of the New Deal programs, and seven of nine judges at the time of the affair were Republican appointees. They struck down a national minimum-wage law on the grounds it was the States' business, then struck down a New York State law doing exactly the same thing, giving the lie to their early reasoning. The Hughes Court in Roosevelt's first term pursued a ridiculously narrow interpretation of the Commerce Clause which Justice Stone called a "Tortured construction of the Constitution. ", [6] which prevented the government from regulating industries even as large and nationally important as coal mining. SUBSTANTIVE 1: MORAL LEADERSHIP This is an area where the contrast between the two men could not be starker. One of the major issues of the 1930s was Civil Rights. FDR was in a difficult position here, because he relied on the votes of segregationist Southern Democrats to get his agenda through Congress. Despite opposition from his own party, FDR issued executive order 8802 [7] the first Presidential directive on Civil Rights since reconstruction. He also appointed the first black Federal judge in American history, and his WPA "Employed a percentage of blacks higher than their numbers in the national population and paid wages two times more than what many had been earning. " [8] Now contrast this with Reagan's record on AIDS, one of the most important issues of the 80s. AIDS first came to national attention in 1981. Reagan did not even utter the word 'AIDS' until 1987, eighteen months after even his ideological running-mates, the Thatcher government in the UK, had authorized a national TV ad campaign to raise awareness. By this time, 27,909 Americans had died from the disease. His administration denied requests from the Center for Disease Control and National Institutes of Health for more funding into the disease. "Between June 1981 and May 1982 the CDC spent less than $1 million on AIDS and $9 million on Legionnaire's Disease. At that point more than 1,000 of the 2,000 reported AIDS cases resulted in death; there were fewer than 50 deaths from Legionnaire's Disease. " [9] Reagan's failure was due to his indebtedness to radical right-wing Christians in the Republican Party. Note how FDR, while far from perfect, took action to improve people's lives which upset his own party, while Reagan put keeping on the right side of his party above American lives. For these reasons, he is rightly a hate figure in the gay community. SUBSTANTIVE 2: FOREIGN POLICY My opponent is trying to sell ridiculous notion that giving the Soviet system, which he himself admits was horribly inefficient, 'More economic competition' led directly to its collapse, while actively fighting a war against the Nazis (along with instituting the lend-lease program to support Britain in doing so) merely expedited victory at best. This is clearly ridiculous. He notes victories of the Soviet and British forces, without considering the that having to engage on both fronts made it more difficult for Germany to win on either. Even if it were entirely true, there are still two major problems with this. One is that given that the German regime was engaged in a campaign of systematic genocide, even delaying this defeat would have brought the genocide closer to completion. Second is the fact that the very force he is saying could have defeated Germany on its own is PRECISELY the barbarous regime he gives Reagan credit for helping to bring down! If we are to accept that the USSR was evil, why would we accept the premise that letting it defeat Germany on its own, therefore giving it a stronger position within Europe that it actually attained is a good thing? That makes absolutely no sense. [1]. http://www.ocregister.com... [2]. http://www.salon.com... [3]. http://clinton4.nara.gov... [4]. http://ourfuture.org... [5]. http://www.larouchepub.com... [6]. http://www.smithsonianmag.com... [7]. http://www.ourdocuments.gov... [8]. http://suite101.com... [9]. http://www.actupny.org...