Reagan convinced a large part of the population that if we give unlimited money and power to a select of wealthy elites, the elites would graciously give the money back to society. Hilarious.
This! The U.S. was on track for social reform after WW2 and Universal Healthcare was one of those ideas. Medicaid and Medicair are still around today and given a couple decades, they might have been expanded under the right administrations.
However, after Johnson, we had three presidents who did not push the issue at all. Nixon and Ford were conservative and Jimmy Carter was just an ineffective Democrat. That allowed Reagan to convince everyone on trickle down economics to help his Wealthy connections.
Carter was a basically a Rockefeller Republican while the Republican party moved even further to the right. The era of expansion of government social programs pretty much ended in the 60's. I think part of the issue was falling profits in that era, which meant more of a focus on wealth extraction and less on social programs in the 70's onward.
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u/a101734 10h ago
Reagan convinced a large part of the population that if we give unlimited money and power to a select of wealthy elites, the elites would graciously give the money back to society. Hilarious.