"Ask yourself, are you better off now than you were four years ago?" Who asked this question?

In a televised debate with President Jimmy Carter a week before the American election of 1980, Ronald Reagan posed a simple but devastating question to TV viewers. “Ask yourself: are you better off now than you were four years ago?” He went on to obtain a landslide victory over Carter.

The voters in 1980 wanted to forget about Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter. They saw something refreshing in Ronald Reagan. His TV commercials were very effective. He promised the people of America a new dawn. The U.S. electorate had waited four years too long for Carter's promises to be kept.

Reagan came forward and asked Americans to "dream heroic dreams." He wanted people to discard the corrosive pessimism of the age.

More Info: en.wikipedia.org

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billyboy915

Yes, Saint Reagan won and the good life for middle America collapsed. While the GDP kept going up, only the top 10% got any richer. No one else shared in the growing bounty. Trickle-down economics was and still is a bad joke. Deregulation and tax cuts for the rich are causing the middle class to shrink and the GOP is still trying to shove more of it down our throats. The tide went out in the 80s and has not come back in. The Drumpf presidency is the result of an ever-shifting of the GOP to the farthest right we have ever seen! Now we have a Carrot-In-Chief who is still "learning" how to do his job and acknowledges, finally, that "it is harder than he thought it would be." This is why we should never have put a political neophyte into the top office.

jshehan

Spinning in his grave watching the current bumbler stumbling through his Republican party fiasco.

Johnny Rock

Reagan administration, perhaps greatest ever, turned the country around and got it going again in the right direction. FDR administration was a great one for our country too.

William Laughlin

Johnny Rock, Reagan worked for the rich. His trickle down economics was a failure. The rich got richer and the middle and lower classes saw nothing of the bounty of this country. Reagan was a union buster, working against the middle class, blue collar workers. With his administration began the decline of the American middle class. With Bush Sr. came more of the same. Our deficit rose higher and higher. With Clinton, the deficit was completely reversed. If Reagan, a Republican was so great, why does it always take a Democrat to straighten out our money troubles?