Carter + Reagan

Question 1

Gerald Ford ran for President but lost in 1976. Who did he lose to?

Answer 1

Jimmy Carter

Question 2

What should we know about Jimmy Carter?

Answer 2

He came after a lot of Presidents who had been caught lying. So he wanted to be as honest as possible with the American public.

Question 3

How did Jimmy Carter try to be honest with the American people?

Answer 3

He told them about the problems that the USA faced

1. Too many people are materialists
2. Shortage of fuel is America’s own fault
3. America needs to make its own energy

Question 4

What problem did Jimmy Carter have with materialism?

Answer 4

He said too many Americans wanted to buy stuff just to have it, or to impress other people. That society was rejecting Jesus’s teachings about not making a God out of the stuff you own.

Yeah, Jimmy Carter was religious, but also a Democrat.

Question 5

Why did Jimmy Carter blame the USA for its own fuel problem?

Answer 5

He said that the USA was too dependent on oil from other countries.

He also said the USA needed energy freedom. The USA would get energy freedom by creating more of its own energy.

Question 6

How did Jimmy Carter imagine energy freedom?

Answer 6

He thought that the USA should research more solar and wind power so that the USA could generate fuel that was clean and free.

40 years ago, Jimmy Carter wanted to create solar panels and wind farms.

Question 7

What is stagflation?

Answer 7

High unemployment, where a lot of people don’t have jobs

High inflation, where stuff costs more

Question 8

Did stagflation go away during Carter’s Presidency?

Answer 8

No, just like under Ford, it continued to stay the same.

Question 9

What was the Salt 2 Treaty?

Answer 9

It was passed when Carter was President and was a further reduction in the nukes that Russia and the USA had.

Even though Carter was a Democrat and Nixon was a Republican, Carter continued Nixon’s Detente policy because Carter wanted to remove all nuclear weapons from both the USA and Russia.

Question 10

What happened to the fascist dictator in Iran while Carter was President?

Answer 10

The fascist dictator of Iran ran away because a very religious Iranian Revolution overthrew him and installed their own religious fascist dictator.

Question 11

What is the name of the new religious fascist dictator in Iran?

Answer 11

The fascist dictator’s title is called Ayatollah

Ahhh yaaa toe laaaa

Question 12

Did the Ayatollah like the USA?

Answer 12

Nope. Hated the USA for putting a fascist dictator in Iran for almost 30 years. So the fascist dictator got revenge.

Question 13

How did Iran’s ayatollah get revenge?

Answer 13

During the Iranian Revolution, they kidnapped 66 American citizens and held 52 of them, hostage, for more than one year.

Question 14

Did Jimmy Carter try to save the kidnapped Americans?

Answer 14

He ordered Operation Eagle Claw to rescue them, but it failed.

Question 15

What major fuel problem did the USA have during Ford and Carter’s Presidencies?

Answer 15

Gas shortages. Meaning, there wasen’t enough gas for people to buy.

And you know what people do when they think there is a shortage of something?

They HOARD. HOARD. HOARD.

Question 16

What does hoard mean?

Answer 16

It means that during the shortage of fuel, they would buy gas, even when they didn’t need it, so that they would always be prepared in case gas ran out.

Question 17

What effect does hoarding gas have on the USA?

Answer 17

It means that when people went to buy gas, there were long lines of people trying to buy it.

Question 18

What caused the shortages of gasoline?

Sort of important to know since the shortages of gasoline is what caused Americans to hoard gas

Answer 18

A group of countries called OPEC said they were refusing to sell any gasoline to the USA.

OPEC stands for

Organization of

Petroleum (oil)

Exporting

Countries

***exporting means selling your stuff to other countries. Since these countries make a lot of oil, they export(sell) their oil to other countries

Question 19

Why did OPEC stop selling gas to the USA?

Answer 19

While FORD was President it was because the USA backed up this middle eastern country called Israel. So OPEC stopped selling oil

While CARTER was President, it was because the USA tried getting involved in the Iranian Revolution

Question 20

Who decided to run against Jimmy Carter for President in 1980?

Answer 20

Ronald Reagan

Question 21

When Ronald Reagan was running for President against Jimmy Carter, what did Reagan promise?

Answer 21

1. To cut taxes
2. To cut welfare spending that helps the poor
3. Reduce the power of labor unions to bring jobs back to the USA
4. Bring home the Iranian hostages
5. To bring hope back to America

Question 22

What was Ronald Reagan’s attitude towards Jimmy Carter?

Answer 22

He thought Carter complained too much and was wrong about the USA needing to switch to clean energy.

Ronald Reagan thought Carter was also wrong about materialism and that materialism was good for the USA since consumers would buy stuff and improve the economy.

Question 23

Who became President in 1980?

Answer 23

Ronald Reagan.

and his Vice President was George H. W. Bush

Question 24

What did Ronald Regan do to the taxes for the rich?

Answer 24

He cut the taxes for the rich from 70% to 28% by the time he left office

Question 25

How did Reagan view Nixon’s vision of Detente that Ford and Carter had all followed?

Answer 25

He disliked it and thought it was weak on Communism.

Reagan wanted to scare Russia and the Communists so he got Congress to increase its military spending.

He also had this plan called STAR WARS

Question 26

What was STAR WARS?

Answer 26

It was basically Reagan’s plan for the US to have giant space lasers that could destroy any nukes launched by Russia.

Question 27

What did people think of Reagan’s STAR WARS?

Answer 27

People said he was crazy and it was never going to happen. Which it didn’t.

But the government spent 30 billion dollars researching the idea over 10 years.

Question 28

Who were the “welfare queens”?

Answer 28

People who took advantage of government help by lying about their income, saying they were poor, just to get free food or medical care

Question 29

Why does the idea of “welfare queens” matter?

Answer 29

Because the idea that there are people who don’t need the help but are getting free government help anyway makes a lot of people very angry.

And Reagan told those angry people that as President he would make it harder for people to get government help, in order to reduce people’s lying.

Question 30

Who were the Evangelicals?

Answer 30

These are a group of people who are united in their love of Jesus Christ and their hatred of abortion and LGBT people.

Question 31

Did the Evangelicals like Ronald Reagan?

Answer 31

Yes. They loved him because Ronald Reagan was also an Evangelical.

Question 32

What did was spreading throughout the 1980s while Reagan was President?

Answer 32

HIV. This is the disease that was killing tens of thousands of Americans every year while Reagan was President

Question 33

What did Reagan say about HIV and AIDS when he was asked about it?

Answer 33

He didn’t bring it up or like to talk about it because the disease seemed to be sexually transmitted among the LGBT community

Question 34

How is HIV spread?

Answer 34

mothers can give it to their babies.

Sharing needles.

sexual intercourse

In other words, non-LGBT people were also getting HIV but the government wasn’t doing anything about it.

Question 35

What is Just Say No?

Answer 35

Reagan’s attempts at trying to get kids to stop using drugs.

Basically, they created drug awareness week where kids are supposed to show how they are drug-free and “just say no” to drugs.

Ronald Reagan’s wife, Nancy Reagan, was the one who led this effort.

Question 36

Who is Sandra Day O Conner?

Answer 36

The first female justice on the Supreme Court

Question 37

What was the Equal Rights Amendment?

Answer 37

It was a constitutional amendment that would have made it so that men and women are equal.

Question 38

Who opposed the Equal Rights Amendment?

Answer 38

Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party.

Question 39

What did Reagan do to the national debt by the time he left office?

Answer 39

He tripled the national debt. He did this because he cut the income the government made when he cut taxes.

We went from having a debt of 738 billion to 2138 billion (2.1 trillion)

Question 40

What is Reaganomics?

(officially called supply-side economics)

Answer 40

It’s the idea that giving tax cuts to the rich creates jobs. That’s because of what they call the “trickle-down” effect, where the wealth will “trickle-down” from the rich people to everyone else.

Question 41

Why did Russia stop being communist?

Answer 41

It was running out of money from a failed invasion of Afghanistan that lasted 10 years.

As a result of the lack of money, they didn’t have the power to maintain control over other parts of Europe and Asia, and so Russia fell apart into Russia we know today.

Question 42

When did Russia stop being communist officially?

Answer 42

When George H. W. Bush was President.

That’s when the Berlin Wall, and many other walls, came down as Communism came to an end in Russia.

Question 43

Did Ronald Reagan support the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

Answer 43

No. Like many conservatives, he opposed making the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. He also opposed making Martin Luther King Jr. Day a federal holiday.