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Ivan Eland, Senior Fellow at The Independent Institute and regular contributor to Antiwar.com, discusses the historical revisionists coming out of the woodwork for Ronald Reagan’s 100 birthday; Reagan’s overrated presidency, from foreign policy to the economy; why the Soviet collapse had more to do with a failed economic model than provocative US policy; how Iran Contra dealt a huge blow to Constitutional checks and balances, with the Executive branch doing an end-run around Congress and the Boland Amendment to secretly fund the Nicaraguan Contras; the persistence of Reagan’s “fake” tax cut model (cutting taxes without cutting spending simply hides the costs of government) evident in Dick Cheney’s “deficits don’t matter” mantra; why a better Cold War strategy would have been to let the USSR run amok in the empire-killing money pits of South and Central Asia and Latin America; and the Pentagon’s conflict of interest in making threat assessments (why would they ever not find one?)

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