It has been 30 years since the election of what could be the worst president in American history, we are finally starting to see the results of his policies and they are even worse then we could have imagined. In 1980 we went from electing a president to electing a puppet of corporations and Wall Street, one who was weak on foreign policy and weaker on domestic policy.
Before the Wall Street puppet came to town it was common to have one parent stay home with the children and you could live on a one income household. Reagan cut the taxes for the wealthiest Americans in half and began to run of the largest debt increase in history and doubled the debt ran up by ever president before him combined. The price of everything started to increase at record paces while wages stayed flat or decreased for the majority of American. The days of having one parent working and living a decent life where over and now you where lucky to get buy with both parents working leading to the latchkey generation.
No longer would there be family vacations or a parent to stay home and help their kids with homework or encourage them to go outside and play. The new American dream would now being happy to just have food on the table and the ability to take your kid to the doctor if something was wrong. The only thing that trickled down from Reaganomics was Poverty and hunger.
The children who where left home are now grown up and starting to become parents, to them it is common for both parents to work and no one to take care of the children. They grew up in a generation where they where left at home or if their parents both had good jobs they where raised by babysitters, it seems second nature to them to plop their child in front of a TV or video game.
When I was younger (grew up in the 80’s) it was common for neighborhood kids to get together outside and play but as I got older it was less and less common. Today you almost never see a group of kids outside playing hide and seek or war. Looking back I now know that I grew up poor but didn’t know it at the time because my parents would sacrifice things they needed for us children and we never saw them worry about how to pay the next bill or put food on the table.
Today because of deregulation started under Reagan and continued on through the last 30 years things have gotten even worse, the wealth gap is larger then any time in history and families are struggling to get by more now then any time in history. Parents can no longer afford to send their kids to college if they are lucky enough to graduate high school. The republicans like to blame all this on President Barack Obama even though they have run the country for 20 of the last 30 years and it is their “trickle down economics” that believe if you deregulate and allow Wall street to run free that they will get rich and share the wealth with everyone else.
At a time when their policies have lead to record poverty and over 40,000 people a year are dying because they can not afford health insurance the party of Reagan wants to take away those safety nets and gut programs like Medicaid, Medicare, Food Stamps and other programs that help the most needy among us. Their policies have decimated the middle class and put people into poverty and now they want to just completely destroy that class also. Now they want poor people who can not even afford to feed their children or buy medicine they need to survive to pay more in taxes.
Reagans policies destroyed this country and the traditional family now the republican party want to put the final nail in the coffin. They give Ronald credit for bringing down the soviet union but the truth is he did more to destroy America then he ever did to defeat the soviets. It seems each generation has got more entitled and I’m afraid to see what the future looks like especially if the republicans get their wish gain power since their policies favor the rich and powerful over Women, Children, the environment and seniors. One day they will learn that when the rich has all the money they can make all the high tech things they want but if no one can afford to buy them it won’t matter and when people revolt and stop waiting in line for the new I-phone and have their kids go out and play instead of buying the newest video games then and only then will the rich take notice and start to fear the working class and realize that Reaganomics has ended..
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