Fuck Reagan

Many times over the years I've said that history will look back at Ronald Reagan as a fucking monster we all were hypnotized by, most recently last May in this rather brilliant thesis by moi, Xmastime (Xmasmoi? 🤔)

ANYhoo, since you people refuse to take fewer than a few decades to catch up with me, maybe you'd rather hear all about it from someone else, maybe about the fact that college tuition crippling an entire generation of kids is directly because of ta-da! Reagan!

The Reagan administration pushed through Congress a combination of tax- and budget-cutting measures. No federal program suffered deeper cuts than student aid. Effectively, these changes shifted the federal government’s focus from providing students higher education grants to providing loans.

Reagan administration Education Secretary Terrel Bell would later write that students needing aid were part of the problem, not very different from other “undeserving” Americans, no different than the “welfare queen,” the out-of-work father drawing unemployment insurance, the poor families on Medicaid, the elderly in need of Medicare or even farmers relying on subsidies.

Elected officials up-and-down the ballot took notice that there would be no electoral consequence for cutting higher education spending. In fact, voters were far more likely to punish lawmakers for raising taxes. Elected officials made the political calculus that it was safer politically to divert existing funds from discretionary costs to mandatory costs like health care, prisons and primary education, than raise taxes.

Pretty much everything we see today as being terrible - including Trump - can be traced back in a straight line to this motherfucker and the billions of idiots who still worship him today. Fucking hell.