Friday, February 13, 2009

When Myth and Reality Collide: FDR meet Obama



America, there's a saying, "if you don't learn from your History, you are doomed to repeat it". Yet for some reason Barack Obama and his friends in the Media are loving all this Obama is the New FDR talk... Franklin D. Roosevelt (D) for all his mythology was a four term president that presided over and by all accounts extended the Great Depression for at least 7 years, so tell my Why anyone would want Barack Obama to resemble him in anyway? Having said that if the Fedora fits...

Obama's Recession already in Full Swing, and the New President is just a few days away from signing into law the most expansive Government spending bill in the History of our Nation and throwing us into a full blown Depression. He's been in office for less than a month, and he was some kind of community organizer before that, he's got a cabinet filled with Tax Cheats and we're giving him a blank check of Taxpayer Money in the 'Hope' that the Government can Solve the Problem? We probably are going to get what we deserve...

Michael Fumento wrote over at HumanEvents.com back in November...

Surely many who voted for Obama saw him as potentially the new FDR, the man to lead us out of hard economic times. But they’ve been misled, for even FDR wasn’t FDR. He is a quasi-mythical creature who not only didn’t end the Great Depression but probably greatly prolonged the nation’s economic agony with his New Deal programs and a menagerie of other foolish measures.

Just look at the numbers. Unemployment from 1923 to 1929 averaged a mere 3.3%. In FDR’s first year, 1933, it hit its high point of 24.9%. Joblessness did decline for the next three years to 14.3% in 1936, but that’s still deep in depression territory. Then the next year unemployment actually spiked up and didn’t fall to 1936 levels again until 1941. “By June 1937, writes Marquette University economic historian Gene Smiley in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, “the recovery...was over.”


The Recovery was over.

FDR promised his National Industrial Recovery Act or NIRA would put people back to work and rehabilitate the economy. Sound familiar? Obama's Stimulus Package brought to you by the Democrats and three Republicans (Collins, Snowe and Spector-remember their names),will Stop the Natural Economic Recovery. It won't Stimulate anything, except for donations to the Campaign cofffers. This isn't a "Stimulus" it's "Porkulus" filled with Billions of dollars of wasteful spending. There is even a website dedicated to tracking all the Pork in the Stimulus...Porkulus.org

Obama's plan to Grow Government will hurt the private sector now, just as it did in the days of FDR. Don't believe me...How about Two Economists from UCLA?

After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

"Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump," said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA's Department of Economics. "We found that a relapse isn't likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies."


Ill Conceived Stimulus policies?

Why does that sound so familiar? Hmmm....

The article released by UCLA goes on to quote Cole as saying...

"The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes," Cole said. "Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened."


I don't know about you but I'm about over this economy now, and many economists believe we could start a recovery in as little as six months, assuming the Government doesn't get involved. But with Obama's New New Deal coming down the pike are we to assume at least a 7 year delay?

Isn't it Thomas Jefferson who was quoted as saying, "the scariest words you can ever hear are I'm from the Government, and I'm hear to Help"? Where is that Can Do Attitude? Have we really all turned into Ms. Johnson thinking Obama is going to pay our Mortages? Are we the Mother who thinks Obama should buy us 'Snacks'? Or are we the America that gets up and goes to work every day to provide for our family and are proud to say We've earned everything we have....

I just don't know anymore....but one thing I do know is that this isn't 1931. Americans feel empoverished if they only have a Playstation 3 and not a Xbox 360, so I don't know that the 'soup line' thing will be as popular for Obama as it was for FDR...I guess we're going to find out...