A letter to the Daily News this morning touted, as conservatives invariably do, Reagan’s legacy as a great president. While I’m not a huge fan of the man, in fairness, Reagan did have two impressive accomplishments to his credit.
First, cutting the absurdly high tax rates of the time and simplifying the tax code. That was something that needed to be done (and now needs to be done again) and he did it.
Second, he accepted the Soviet Union’s Gorbachev as someone who could be negotiated with. That was a visionary step, given that most conservative politicians and pundits insisted Gorbachev’s push toward a less totalitarian USSR was a scheme to get us off guard, and that negotiating with him could only be “appeasement.” Reagan was able to convince the USSR that he wanted peace, which made easing the tensions between the two nations possible—and without which, I doubt the peaceful breakup of the USSR would have happened.
Those are two things Reagan admirers are entitled to be proud of, but let’s not forget that Reagan did a great many things that range from bad to shameful:
•He increased social security taxes on the poor to the point that despite his income-tax cuts, take-home pay dropped for a lot of the working poor (I should know, I was one of them).
•The supposed defender of freedom cheerfully supported every right-wing tyrant on Earth simply because they were anticommunist. The White House position was that we could reform military dictators but Communist governments would never collapse without armed force (wildly erroneous in hindsight).
That included standing up and proclaiming that the El Salvador government was complying with human-rights rules even when it was butchering nuns and priests; backing death squads in other parts of Central America; supporting Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos when even his own people wanted him gone; siding with South Africa’s apartheid regime against the African National Congress in the belief the ANC would institute a Communist state; supporting Saddam Hussein and resisting any sanctions or penalties for his use of chemical WMDs during the Iran/Iraq war; and, of course, selling weapons to Iran in order to raise money for anti-Communist guerillas in Nicaragua.
•Using the FBI to spy on groups that criticized Reagan’s Latin American policy.
•Saddling us with the multibillion dollar expense of developing the consistently ineffective Star Wars missile defense (which both Bushes and Clinton have continued to waste money on).
•Racking up record budget deficits. Back in the day, this was often blamed on Congress, but George Will calculated once that if Congress passed Reagan’s budgets exactly as written, it would have cut the deficit by no more than one-sixteenth.
•At a time when medical researchers were flooding the government with requests for money to research and treat AIDS, the White House kept telling Congress that there were no research requests requiring added funding.
I’m not saying these cancel out the good stuff he did do, but conservatives shouldn’t be allowed to airbrush Reagan’s many failures out of the picture.

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