Obama’s New Deal rehash

President Obama, the man who personally identified himself with the
virtue of hope and as the embodiment of change, has the stalest ideas of
anyone in Washington. A lot has been said about the jobs bill he keeps
exhorting Congress to pass while it lingers in the Democrat-controlled
Senate, namely that it is just a rehash of the stimulus package passed
by the Democrat-controlled Congress in 2009. The only difference, of
course, is that it will be paid for with tax increases — it’s an even
worse idea.

Both stimuli are simply poor rehashes of the New Deal. Obama has bought into the long-debunked myth that we spent our way out of the Great Depression. For those not familiar with the debunking, allow me to summarize briefly. Money has to come from somewhere; if you simply print money, you inflate prices and have, in so doing, effectively wound up where you started.

It’s sad that the facts of the Depression are so easily forgotten. Economist Lawrence Reed of the Mackinac Institute says President Hoover is mistakenly presented in standard history texts as a laissez-faire president, while the reality is that he signed into law so many costly and foolish bills that one of Franklin Roosevelt’s top aides later said, “Practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started.”