Ah, "the Great Communicator"

A nice, concise expression of something we should remember about the American Right's favorite actor-politican:

In 1981, through his brutal and vicious budget cuts, Ronald Reagan inaugurated mass homelessness in this country on a scale never before seen since the Great Depression.

People forget that it was he who turned the crazies loose on the street, and not the "Liberals".

Reagan ... used to refer to them as “urban campers.” They were [Reagan believed] like fucking lazy hippies; they were dropouts who wanted to be free of all responsibilities, like reporting for work in the morning, and they were sleeping on the sidewalk every night out of choice. Which is utter bullshit. The majority of the homeless are mental patients who got kicked out of the hospital because of budget cuts, and they should be housed in an institution and given medication. The rest are members of the middle and working classes who slipped through the cracks. By the way, did you make your last credit card payment? Living paycheck to paycheck like most of the country?

These are asides from an essay on Bartleby the Scrivenor by Wolcott Wheeler.