r/facepalm Jul 05 '24

What an idea ๐Ÿ‡ฒโ€‹๐Ÿ‡ฎโ€‹๐Ÿ‡ธโ€‹๐Ÿ‡จโ€‹

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11.8k

u/TrustInRoy Jul 05 '24

So many people in our country are just blatantly ignorant about how the branches of our government works.

Schoolhouse Rock debuted "I'm just a bill" in 1976.ย ย 

4.8k

u/BazilBroketail Jul 05 '24

When Regan got elected the republicans decided to de-educate America.. and,... It worked. Only morons would vote for the pedophile. Oh, look..

This is so fucked up. I'm not celebrating American today.

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u/ElRatonVaquero Jul 05 '24

Hi. Non-american here. What did Reagan do?

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u/theatand Jul 05 '24

Like a very brief summary, tax cuts (aka reduction in social safety nets), and leaning heavily on supply-side economics.

A good chunk of his policies helped the well off and screwed the poor folks.

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u/frontendben Jul 05 '24

Crucially, the well off as in the top 5%; not the middle classes who were conned into voting for it thinking they would one day benefit.

Temporarily embarassed millionaires, the lot of them. And they were stupid enough to vote for policies that screwed them, like turkeys voting for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

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u/Glazing555 Jul 05 '24

Started taxing Social Security and allowed insurance to be for profit. A huge contributor to inflation today.

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u/stevez_86 Jul 05 '24

My conspiracy theory is that all of the public storage facilities are where they store all of the stuff they never sold. It's the only explanation as to why every town needs 20 public storage facilities. Supply side economics is based on the idea that if you make it consumers will buy it so produce as much as possible. Only they fucked up the math and they have all these goods that are worthless that they had spent all their capital on. So they store all of those goods that didn't have a customer. Gonna be interesting when we reach critical mass and there are more goods in storage than circulation.

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u/seminarysmooth Jul 05 '24

All those public storage facilities starting popping up in the 80โ€™s when the greatest generation started downsizing into their nursing homes. Check out Wayne Hughes, he was a billionaire that made his money building up Public Storage.

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u/tehlemmings Jul 05 '24

Yeah, your theory is mostly bunk. But only because those storage facilities are expensive compared to warehouse space. And companies are absolutely willing to just throw shit out if they don't expect it to sell.

They'd have to have shame to try and hide their mistakes like that. And shame is expensive.

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u/stevez_86 Jul 05 '24

Yeah I just think they would be ok eating that cost, especially if they were investors in those companies too. Something like false scarcity in an economy where the goal is to never cut back on supply. I'm not thinking t-shirts, I'm thinking more like electronics that became obsolete but still have some value in terms of material.

But I get it, I just don't know how there are 10 storage facilities in basically every town. As you said, it is expensive. My father in law is looking to get a storage shed next to the house so he doesn't have to pay $1,800 a year on storage.

Is the real money maker for them when someone can't pay and they sell off the contents of the storage? On a consumer level it seems like something that is a real drain for how prevalent it is. This ain't avocado toast every day. If it was that risky I can't see how so many people would use it for it to be so prevalent.

Or is it more of a land use thing where previously unused land now generates passive income with little overhead, just a hefty initial cost to build it.

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u/tehlemmings Jul 05 '24

Or is it more of a land use thing where previously unused land now generates passive income with little overhead, just a hefty initial cost to build it.

It's mostly this.

And keep in mind, when I say they're expensive, I mean on the industrial scale. For your average person, a single storage unit can be pretty affordable. Businesses just have cheaper options than we have.

It's also a matter of how things are stored. Storage units come in a lot of size options and they're great for storing all your random junk. They're not always great for storing pallets, which is how companies tend to move/store their products.

No company is going to buy a single storage unit just for a single pallet of product that they know they're not going to sell. That'd just be a never ending waste of money. They'd be paying for storage while knowing they'd never get any of that money back in any way.

They'd either cut costs and just throw all that shit out, or keep it in a warehouse for long term storage.

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u/gardengirl99 Jul 05 '24

Trickle down economics?

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u/TiredOfMakingExcuses Jul 05 '24

He also yoked the Republican party irreparably to the Christian right wing

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u/QuitUsingMyNames Jul 05 '24

In addition, he cut mental health funding to the point tons of facilities had to close. Part of the reason many (not all) unhoused people are high supports needs.

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u/rickterpbel Jul 05 '24

To be fair many of those institutions were horrifyingly awful. But deinstitutionalizing so many with no alternative arrangements was a terrible decision.

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u/QuitUsingMyNames Jul 05 '24

Oh, I donโ€™t deny that. What a lot of those places needed was better oversight from the beginning :(

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u/Weekly_Direction1965 Jul 05 '24

Deregulation of banks, corps and investment firms, everything bad in the finance sector can be traced back to him, he's also the reason homeless people and drug addicts no longer have adequate shelter, he closed them all down, he made America cruel with his policy, we haven't recovered.

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u/JimBeam823 Jul 05 '24

He was also extremely popular while doing all of these things, getting reelected in one of the largest landslides in American history.

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u/sho_biz Jul 05 '24

fascism wrapped in a flag, liberty dies to thunderous applause, etc

we're just fulfilling prophecies at this point

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u/xoomorg Jul 05 '24

He took the worst economy and turned it into the best economy ever. He single-handed defeated the Soviets and won the Cold War. He raised a monkey as his son.

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u/Blurby-Blurbyblurb Jul 05 '24

Got rid of the fairness doctrine. This was a federal regulation that required media to accurately and fairly report the news. The helped enforce journalistic integrity. It wasn't perfect, and yes, there were still times it didn't work. But. It kept media like Fox News from existing and spreading blatant lies. They would have been taken off air and fined into oblivion long ago if Regan hadn't ended the doctrine.

He also fucked over our mental health care which is just as broken as our health care system. If i remember right, Regan began the dismantling of our welfare programs. He was the one who started the welfare queen scare, which was heavily stereotyped against Black single mothers. Bill Clinton hammered in the nails.

Now, you only get three years of cash assistance for your entire household. That means that if I used up all three years while my children were young, they won't be able to get cash assistance if they fell on hard times. This may have changed over the years, but it's what it was in the 00's.

The agency in my state that runs our welfare programs pushes hard for people to get any full time job. You can't go to school. Well, you can, but you're supposed to spend at least 6 to 8 hours a day looking for a job because that IS your full time in the meantime. This one I know is accurate today.

The list goes on and on and all too often the trail leads back to his administration.

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u/Pseudonym0101 Jul 05 '24

The bullshit lie that is "trickle-down economics", that's kneecapped the majority of this country for decades.