Ronald Reagan was a bad president, who promulgated bad policies and appointed bad people -- under Reagan, we sent the deficit skyrocketing, growing faster in real dollars than under any other president, including the current one. We cut social spending to the bone, creating the homeless problem by turning hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people out on the streets. We appointed Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court. We cut school funding, trying to classify ketchup as a vegetable. We banned the Beach Boys as attracting the wrong sort of crowd. We traded arms, money, drugs, and hostages between Iran and the Nicaraguan rebels. More appointed officials were indicted and convicted of crimes than under any other president. We gave chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein. We claimed that trees cause most pollution.

He catastrophically lowered taxes in 1981, creating debt so bad he raised taxes each of the next six years and still didn't make up for it. And while he streamlined the complex and exemption-riddled income tax, his changes created the largest-ever shift of tax burden from the wealthy to the middle-class and working poor.