A New New Deal

It looks like Obama and his fellow travelers want to use FDR's New Deal as the template for our economic recovery.


From the Washington Post

With financial markets fluctuating wildly and unemployment rising, Democrats want to push a stimulus package through Congress in January and have it ready for Obama's signature when he takes office Jan. 20. Over the weekend, the president-elect announced that he had instructed his advisers to assemble a massive jobs program that also would make a "down payment" on much of his domestic agenda.

The plan would include new funding for public-works projects to repair the nation's crumbling infrastructure, as well as a fresh infusion of cash to promote green technology and alternative-energy sources. It also would include targeted tax cuts for working families, students, the elderly and job-creating businesses that Obama touted on the campaign trail.

The problem is that it wasn't FDR's economic policies that got us out of the Great Depression.

Like Democrats, "many people are looking back to the Great Depression and the New Deal for answers to our problems," says George Mason University Economics Professor Tyler Cowen . "But while we can learn important lessons from this period, they’re not always the ones taught in school."

What Cowen means is that the conventional wisdom of the Great Depression is absolutely wrong: Government action did not save the economy. "In short, expansionary monetary policy and wartime orders from Europe, not the well-known policies of the New Deal, did the most to make the American economy climb out of the Depression."

Now if you want to instigate our entry into a world war, like some have suggested FDR did, that might work. Your Code Pink wackos will have a problem with it. Well maybe not. i don't think they opposed the war so much as the President who lead us into it. If we were attacking an aspirin factory, bombing a Balkan nation into oblivion, or ending a genocide in Africa instead of ousting a genocidal dictator in the Middle East they probably be al right with it. But getting back to the original point, I really don't think selling our children's birthright with these stimulus packages is gonna do it. It didn't for FDR.