+1 Except for your kneejerk need to attack your own party almost every post (blaming Carter?), this is one of the most sensible things you've ever posted in this forum, CO. Reagan is the most overrated president in US history, bar none.
I am going to surprise some of you and agree that Reagan was oversold on the benefits of free trade. In fairness, Reagan's version of free trade, eg NAFTA, was a far cry from what we have today. As far as I know, we run a trade surplus with mexico. Our big imports from Canada and Mexico are oil and nat gas and we were going to be buying that, NAFTA or no NAFTA. The problems of the working class are too nuanced to blame totally or even substantially on Reagan. Ted Kennedy's suicidal immigration policy certainly hurt them badly. The great offshoring of jobs took place largely under liberal hero Bill Clinton, who not only pushed for NAFTA but also pushed for greatly expanded trade with China. Policies pushed by unions like the UAW made it uneconomical to produce cars in the Rust Belt. I seriously doubt that Reagan would have sat around and watched all our manufacturing base move to China. As I recall, he ok'd a tariff on Japanese motorcycles to protect Harley- davidson, even though his free trade advisors howled over it. The bottom line is we got into trouble not by following Reagan's policies but by ignoring them. Does anyone think he would have been in favor of letting FNM/FRE grow so large and operate so carelessly, under democrat CEOs I might add, that they threatened the Treasury? Does anyone think Reagan would have grown the federal budget like Bush did or that he would go along with nationalizing the financial and auto industries like Obama did? Of course, Reagan made a few mistakes along the way, like agreeing to a democrat tax increase in exchange for promised budget cuts that, surprise, never materialized. I guess he will have to be content to be known as the President who rescued our country, won the Cold War, destroyed the Soviet Union and laid the basis for 30 years of economic prosperity.