The thing about Reagan is that he really...didn't do anything he's supposed to have done. Each claim of his greatness can be pretty much shown to be not him.
For instance, sure, he was in office when the 1970s recession recovered. People seem to have forgotten, though, that this had very little to do with Reagan. In fact, Reagan's plan deepened the recession into 1982, and it only ended when oil prices dropped. Reagan's tax cuts significantly crippled the ability of the US government to receive revenue, and he agreed to 15 tax hikes during his presidency. Despite suggesting that "government is the problem", Reagan oversaw an increase in the size of government while simultaneously reducing income, inflating the US debt from 35% of the GDP to 52% of the GDP. Given that Reagan did oversee the US economy through a very strong boom time, this increase is astronomical, as the GDP in the USA shot up in that period. The Reagan years were anything but fiscally responsible. In hard dollars, the debt ballooned from just over 2 trillion dollars to about 4.5 trillion dollars.
Reagan is often credited with ending the Cold War, but pretty much any scholar of this will tell you that the Cold War ending was a sure thing. Reagan did very little other than suggest extremely insane defense plans, yet managed to increase military spending by over $100 million dollars per year during his terms in office. Meanwhile, perestroika in the USSR, followed by glasnost, led to an input in western ideas, combined with the breakdown of the Soviet infrastructure that did things like "feed people". Some money was diverted to military and other means, but overall, the Soviet Union had been doomed for twenty years and Reagan didn't change that at all, no matter how many times he insisted that Mr. Gorbachev "tear down this wall".
That's just two examples I can come up with before I go to supper. Perhaps FDR tried to pack the Supreme Court, but the Congress of the day didn't let him. Reagan actually sold advanced weapon technology to Iran in order to finance the Contras. That's fucking petrifying. The difference between FDR and Reagan is that someone told FDR to stop. Reagan just did it, kept it secret, and put on a babyface when he got busted.
Get government out of my music, my games, my bedroom, and my bank account.
FWIW I too am a fan of Reagan - as an economist who has lived for years in the former Soviet Union, I can tell you what works and what doesn't. But again, this is off topic.
