After eight years, it is eminently clear to conservatives and liberals alike that George W. Bush is one of the worst presidents that the United States has ever suffered. His incompetent handling of what were completely predictable economic crises is historically rivaled only by his fellow Keynesian in laissez faire clothing, Herbert Hoover. Like Bush, Hoover inherited an economy just reaching its inflationary peak. And like Bush, Hoover refused to accept the laws of economic gravity, thus turning what should have been a normal recession into what is now known as the Great Depression.
But there is no problem so great that the credentialed experts of the nation cannot exacerbate it. Hoover was terrible, but Roosevelt managed to be worse. Hoover attempted to meet the challenge posed by the 1929 crash with a wide range of federal interventions that increased federal spending 34 percent during his four years in office; this was little more than one-third of the 98 percent increase under Roosevelt prior to World War II. Federal spending increased 63 percent under Bush, which divided by his two terms means that he spent nearly as much on a term-by-term basis in the same futile attempt to fight off economic contraction as Hoover did. And President-elect Obama is giving every sign that he will do his level best to repeat Roosevelt’s reinforcement of Hoover’s failure when he declared: “Only government can break the vicious cycles that are crippling our economy.”
Government will not break those cycles. It cannot do so because it is government itself that is causing those vicious cycles that are crippling the American economy. Moreover, it is clear to anyone who is paying attention that Obama is aware his plan is not going to work because the claims made on its behalf are changing on a monthly basis.
“Biden told an audience in this economically distressed battleground state that the Democratic presidential candidate’s public works projects would create two million jobs nationwide, including 76,000 new jobs for the middle class in Ohio.”
– Oct. 15, 2008
“President-elect Barack Obama said this weekend he’s planning to introduce an economic recovery program that would create 2.5 million jobs by January 2011.”
– Nov. 24, 2008
“President-elect Barack Obama has increased his employment goal with the nation’s economic outlook worsening, seeking to create or save three million jobs in the next two years instead of the 2.5 million he proposed last month.”
– Dec. 20, 2008
“President-elect Obama raised the jobs forecast for his stimulus plan from three million to as many as four million on Saturday, upping the ante of his economic blueprint for the second time in three weeks.”
– Jan. 10, 2009
There hasn’t been this much desperate tap dancing around statistical predictions since the global warming charlatans first realized that their computer models corresponded with actual temperatures being observed about as closely as a Hamas rocket barrage ever gets to a strategic Israeli target. The Keynesian economic model upon which the Obama plan is based, and with which the mainstream media frame all discussion of the economy, isn’t just outdated or broken, it is less viable than frozen monkey embryos implanted into a post-menopausal woman at an IVF clinic in Tijuana. It is less credible than the Minnesota senatorial election farce. It is, in short, a dead parrot.
It was a little more than four months ago, on Aug. 28, 2008, that the Bureau of Economic Analysis was reporting that GDP growth for Q2 2008 was 3.3 percent and suggesting that the “recession” might be over. Only a month later, that 3.3 percent was revised down to 2.8 percent; no doubt the final report on Q3 2008 will be further revised down from the negative .5 percent that has already been revised down from negative .3 percent in the advance report. These differences may seem small, but collectively they amount to major variances that suffice to render the entire exercise in federal economic intervention an utter fool’s game, and no amount of printing worthless money to pay useless workers to build pointless infrastructure will change that.
It has often been said that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. The great tragedy of Obama’s insane reenactment of FDR’s prolongment of the Great Depression will be that the history was not unknown, but rather, willfully ignored.
