321–330 of 879 posts
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A lot of the deregulation under Carter legitimately did need to happen.
The Motor Carrier Act and Staggers Rail are the only ones that come to mind? Shipping costs were high and routes were guarded and inefficient, and the railroad industry was in shutters. What else had you reckoned?
Looking back, to me he was a much better president then people believed in the 80s. I believe if he got re-elected in 1980, the US would be in a much better place. One thing, it could be argued real work on Climate Change would have begun in 1981 as opposed to where we are now, which is just watching the average probably blowing past 3C in around 70 years from now. For his loss in 1980, I still blame Kennedy. RIP, he…
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Thats not even touching the corruption, lobbying scandals, the grant rigging, the EPA scandals, the 160 billion dollar in "charity" given to banks to bail them out, Operation Ill Wind etc... You could fill books with this mans horrific legacy and its lasting detrimental impact on society. If you can trace the root of our modern problems to one man it would be Reagan.
Carter was the most pro-Palestinian president of the 20th century. It's worth reading his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine:_Peace_Not_Apartheid
He was the first American president to broker a serious Middle East peace agreement between Israel and a Middle Eastern nation (Egypt) - the Camp David Accord.
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Ironically he did more deregulation than Reagan yet somehow we don’t remember it that way. For his electoral loss it’s just that Carter was never interested in the political manoeuvring. He was never going to have a good chance.
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The democrats made a fundamental miscalculation in the late 90s that you can simply pander to brown people and they will turn out for you. The messaging is complex because you tell different audiences different things, and the Internet makes it complicated because conservative Hispanic Catholics don’t align with the platform. In doing that, they ceded rural America, which was devastated by NAFTA and other Clinton era…
Giant agribusiness makes money, but the prosperous dairy operators really need regulation at the federal level to thrive. good thing we elected a party that loves nothing more than federal regulation… /s I am neither democrat nor republican so I have no skin in the game here but I think this thinking here is very naive.
Ever wonder why thousands of Mexicans woke up one day and decided to walk across the desert, never to return? Well, we flooded the market with massive quantities of subsidized corn and put their farms out of business. We did the same thing domestically with other commodities in places like New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
With dairy, you had in-state production requirements and quotas that maintained a balance in price. A smallish dairy farm could support a household reasonably prosperously — there were thousands of farms in places like New York. Now you need thousands of cows to survive - that why milk is often cheaper than water in the supermarket.
But just like WalMart, it gutted a key price of the rural economy. Hell, I watched it happen on a farm I worked on, that operated since the 1600s under the Dutch. Since the early 2000s they board horses for rich people to pay their property taxes.
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What’s your reasoning there? The Soviet economy wasn’t especially dependent on the American presidency.
"In later years, however, former Soviet officials cited SDI as a factor in the eventual collapse of their country, for it showed that the Soviet Union was politically unprepared for and economically incapable of competing in a new arms race with the United States, especially one led by someone as unrelenting as Reagan." https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ronald-Reagan/Relations...
Looking back, to me he was a much better president then people believed in the 80s. I believe if he got re-elected in 1980, the US would be in a much better place. One thing, it could be argued real work on Climate Change would have begun in 1981 as opposed to where we are now, which is just watching the average probably blowing past 3C in around 70 years from now. For his loss in 1980, I still blame Kennedy. RIP, he…
>it could be argued real work on Climate Change would have begun in 1981 as opposed to where we are now That's a common myth. 70s energy policy was a result of the oil crisis, not environment concerns. Sometimes the result was conductive to the environment (e.g. efficiency increases), sometimes it was less so (various US gov research into more polluting alternatives like synthetic oil or shale oil), and sometimes it…
Btw Carter put solar panels on the white house.
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Three Mile Island and then Chernobyl kinda killed that dream. Both had bad actors trying to cover up the leak, and caused the nuclear scare to go even worse. France also has majority ownership of the nuclear plants, something that would never fly in the US (because Socialism!). Even when I was an intern at a power company, the leaders there saw the nuclear power plant the company owned as an "albatross around their n…
Yes, nothing is certain but I do think it wasn’t preordained – a White House which took climate change seriously, which wasn’t so invested in fossil fuel production, might have shifted the conversation to making nuclear safer because it would also reduce the even larger ecological footprint of coal and oil production. Reagan famously appointed a self-described “anti-environmentalist” and counted the dubious accomplis…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_Fuels_Corporation
* You start from coal which has more carbon than oil in any grade you choose, and then add the extra inefficiency of the process so you need more coal than had you burnt it directly. It's like burning coal in a super inefficient manner.
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Ironically he did more deregulation than Reagan yet somehow we don’t remember it that way. For his electoral loss it’s just that Carter was never interested in the political manoeuvring. He was never going to have a good chance.
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"Just say no" to nihilism[0].
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I like to jokingly argue that the primary difference between Democrats and Republicans is disagreement on whether it's more important to subsidize large corporations directly or through tax policy. In reality I think there is a lot of daylight between the parties on social issues that do not affect current power structures . Abortion, trans rights, women's rights, gay marriage, religion in public schools, etc: Tons o…
> Tons of difference. QED.
Or
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSaFnDH...
What choices we have.
Replace the Israeli flag with the US one when we invade someone else again.