Gipper Myths

Courtesy of Atrios and Krugman and Wikipedia:

The House and Senate did not both come under Republican rule during Reagan’s time.

The Berlin Wall did not come down when Reagan was in office.

Reagan is not the president who left office with the highest approval rating in modern times.

Reagan was not “the most popular president ever.”

Reagan did not preside over the longest economic expansion in history.

Reagan did not shrink the size of government.

Reagan did preside over what was at the time the “biggest tax cut in history” but it was almost instantly followed up by the “biggest tax increase in history.”

Reagan was not “beloved by all.” He was loved by some, liked by some, and hated by some with good reason.

Reagan did not “disprove Keynesian economics”; on the contrary, during his term the US economy behaved as predicted by the Keynes General Theory.

Reagan didn’t cause oil prices to fall; Carter did – by bringing in energy conservation and CAFE standards that lowered US demand for oil and caused falling prices.

Reagan did not personally liberate Buchenwald or any other Nazi death camps despite his assertions to the contrary; he spent all of World War 2 in Hollywood making propaganda movies.

Reagan’s economic stimulus package did not end 1970s stagflation; Carter-appointed Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker accomplished this using monetary contraction to induce a particularly short and nasty recession that shocked the economic system out of stagflationary equilibrium.

Reagan refused to believe that AIDS represented a serious threat to public health. His administration fought hard from 1981 until around 1987 to deny funds to HIV research and education, accelerating the spread of the virus and dooming millions to death and disability.

Reagan considered the Islamist mujahideen in Afghanistan to be freedom fighters and the “moral equivalent of our [America’s] founding fathers”; his funding of them set the groundwork for Osama Bin Laden to find refuge and willing allies in Afghanistan a decade later.