Reagan the worst President?

Objective reasons Ronald Reagan was our worst president-  by Adam Tod Brown

This contemporary weblog article from last year, with the ability of years of hindsight, presents reasons why Ronald Reagan is considered by many people as one of the worst Presidents to hold office. These are namely due to the corruption present in members of his team (of which 138 members were investigate, indicted or convicted of being involved in various scandals) the effect of 'Reaganomics', the Iran-Contra Affair, his involvement in a PATCO labour dispute that has had a lasting impact on trade unions, his avoidance of the AIDS issue, the Reagan doctrine and his mental health reforms that arguably contribute to the rise of the number of mass shootings since the 1980's.

The article addresses hatred for Reagan in a humorous but informative way for people that did not live through the Reagan presidency.

His involvement in the PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) shaped the modern American workforce. 13,000 workers left work to demand better working conditions, and Reagan responded in August 1981 with firing the 11,000 that did not return to work. His justification for the controversial move, along with the law forbidding government workers from striking, was that the walk-off constituted a "peril to national safety," as if having to find and train thousands of new air traffic controllers overnight wasn't going to cause any problems. It definitely did. While the feds were able to get around 50 percent of scheduled flights back in the sky in relatively short order, it took a full decade before federal air traffic controllers reached the training and staffing levels they'd been at prior to the dispute.

"More than any other labor dispute of the past three decades, Reagan’s confrontation with the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, or Patco, undermined the bargaining power of American workers and their labor unions. It also polarized our politics in ways that prevent us from addressing the root of our economic troubles: the continuing stagnation of incomes despite rising corporate profits and worker productivity.
By firing those who refused to heed his warning, and breaking their union, Reagan took a considerable risk. Even his closest advisers worried that a major air disaster might result from the wholesale replacement of striking controllers. Air travel was significantly curtailed, and it took several years and billions of dollars (much more than Patco had demanded) to return the system to its pre-strike levels."http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/opinion/reagan-vs-patco-the-strike-that-busted-unions.html

Private employers saw this as a sign of how they could legally treat their workers in a similar situation and so since then the power of striking to demand better working conditions has been lost. Workers pay at the lowest levels stays the same because of Reagan they lost their voice.