On the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Where-Do-You-Republicans-Get-Off-Questioning-Us? “stimulus” bill:
Yet perhaps the clincher is the answer to a bigger question: how did the Great Depression end? It didn’t stop with the conservative suggestion: slashed spending, slashed debt and slashed government activity. It ended with precisely the opposite: the vast fiscal stimulus of the Second World War. The government sent debt soaring to its highest levels in US history (until today) in order to spend more than ever before. It set up the longest boom in US history.
Uh, no. It wasn’t the massive spending of WWII which got us out of the Depression, it was the fact that of the major industrial nations of the world (USA, USSR, Germany, Japan, UK and to a lesser extent France and Italy) only the United States emerged unscathed from WWII in a world in which there was massive war damage to be repaired. In 1945, if you wanted a manufactured item, the United States and Britain were the only fully operational economies, and Britain was flat broke. Couple this with the entirely unforeseen population boom resultant upon increased food supplies and vastly improved public health efforts and, voila!, you’ve got a post-WWII American economic boom. But it was a boom which was, from the start, living on borrowed time.
Absent a massive restructuring of the post-WWII American economy to return it to its pre-Depression free market model, it was only a matter of time before the rebuilt industrial nations – joined by other nations rapidly industrializing – began to eat into America’s market share. The pinch started in the 1960’s but only really began to be felt when the bill came due for Vietnam and the Great Society at the same time the Arabs pulled their first oil embargo, sending energy costs in America soaring. From then on until Reagan, the American economy sputtered along unable to cope … the high tax, high spend, high regulation economy built by FDR simply could not provide growth when this started to require rapid innovation – we were heading back into the Great Depression when we fortunately elected Reagan who lowered taxes and cut regulations…unfortunately, he was unable to bring spending under control, so the seeds of FDR were still there, waiting for the perfect liberal storm to have another go at wrecking the economy.
Here we now stand, poised at the same position we were at the start of the Great Depression with a choice to make – follow the myth of FDR, or understand that you cannot spend your way into wealth? Upon our decision here much depends. Obama and his Democrats are incapable of the decision because they are unaware that the FDR model even has an alternative, let alone a more successful one. Only we Republicans have the knowledge necessary to steer America out of our economic morass, and we are completely shut out of power until at least after the 2010 mid-terms. Rather a tricky situation.
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