Boy, it sounded too good back then in 1980 – reduce the size of government, lower taxes, have all those profits trickling down on everybody with no complicated rules. Make America the biggest military power in the world, fight anybody anywhere. Cut out that wasteful spending, clobber those bad guys with our armed forces, get rid of all those regulations that tie us down ... Yeah! But could they actually pull it off? Could those Americans, or their children, live to see this dream come true?
Yes! The nation Reagan promised and thirty years of Republican efforts have given us our dream. Look around, see that wasteful spending getting cut – the after school programs, the police and firemen jobs, the public health funding, the infrastructure repair, the VA, the National Academy of Science, FEMA, Amtrak --- oh, all those wasteful programs we despised so much back then, now dying or dead. Hooray!
And ditto with those stupid, complicated, nonsensical regulations – requirements that commercial airline pilots have 1000 hours flying time to be hired to fly a passenger jet....banished! Bothersome FDA rules on chemicals in our food, poison on kids’ toys, artificial hormones in our raw meat products ... ignored! Punishment for ethics violations by elected officials ... laughed off! Research-intensive, costly mileage standards and gas-emission control devices ... never happened! Glorious days!
So many, many old, out-dated, foolish and getting-in-the-way-of-business rules we couldn’t wait to ditch: rules against secret wiretapping and torture, to prevent faked intelligence to justify a war, rules of not starting a war with another country, having enough collateral to cover all your business loans, punishment for crimes of government officials. There just was no reason for so much free speech, for so much spreading of the wealth, for blocking commercial development of all that government owned land in our parks, reserves, and forests. No reason to push so much science in government when the Bible told us all we had to know about race, gays, a woman’s place, and who were the pagans deserving of punishment. Hallelujah!
So the money – ah, so much money that would have gone into all this wasteful government stuff -- yes it went into the private sector, where wealth, power, influence, personal satisfaction and freedom from any restraints flourished: banks, stock market brokers, arms merchants, oil companies. A job any one of us could have gotten if we hadn’t been so coddled by liberals.
It is so rare a time in history when people can look around, see the world they have made, and say, "At last, we are living our dream." But we Americans can beam with pride and show the world what we have done – "Look! We’re living in Reagan’s America! And all our problems are solved!"