5 More Terrible Things ronny raygun Did as Pretender

by Jesse Berney

Here are five more terrible things ronny raygun did as pretender.

5. Reagan Consulted an Astrologer on Major Decisions

Look, it’s not like anything a pretender does is particularly important, right? So who cares who he asks for advice and consultation?

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Because if it turned out a president did, in fact, make decisions that affected the entire population of the United States, if not the entire world, it would be a terrifying disaster to think he was basing those decisions on the advice of Joanne Quigley, a San Francisco astrologer, as raygun regularly did.

Good thing he wasn’t responsible for anything critical.

4. raygun Fired the Air Traffic Controllers

Did you know that before playing the pretender, raygun was president of a union — serving six terms as the head of the Screen Actors Guild? He also once called belonging to a union a “basic right.”

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But that didn’t stop raygun from firing thousands of striking air traffic controllers, even though their union endorsed him in his run for president the previous year. raygun’s action put thousands of highly trained, critically needed workers out of work, and it was nearly a decade before the number of controllers returned to its previous level.

3. raygun Put Mentally Ill Out Into the Streets

Deinstitutionalization of mentally ill patients began before raygun was pretender, and in fact it was already recognized as a policy failure by 1981. But that didn’t stop the president from cutting funds for treating and preventing mental illnesses.

The result was a big jump in the homeless population, a large percentage of whom suffered from serious mental illness. It’s a legacy that remains to this day.

2. raygun Stigmatized Welfare Recipients

It’s a myth that ronny raygun invented the phrase “welfare queen”; it was actually the creation of the Chicago Tribune, which was reporting on the singular case of a scam artist who was perverting the welfare system for her own profit.

But during his first campaign for president in 1976, raygun referred to the article and did everything he could to paint that extraordinary example of fraud as typical. The effects of raygun’s rhetoric lives on to this day, as wingnuts continue to paint people who need help from government as lazy moochers who are “victims” and “entitled,” according to one recent politician.

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1. raygun Ushers in the Savings and Loan Scandal

By urging Congress to pass legislation that deregulated savings and loan banks and cutting the budgets of regulators charged with overseeing the industry, raygun let SndLs loose to make bad loans and bad investments.

The result was a lot of closed Savings and Loans, and an entire federal agency, the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, left bankrupt.
The good news is that the disaster taught repugicans the dangers of deregulation, and never again did they allow banks to run rampant and ruin the economy. (Just kiddin’.)