Could it be that what is now called Obamanomics will be the last hurrah and death knell of Keynesian economics in American history? That Keynes will not survive the inevitable crash of the ill-fated left-wing Obama administration and the failure of the American Recovery and Reinvestment and Act (ARRA) to jump start the economy, create millions of new jobs and end the recession? It may very well be. It may be that under President 44 the demand side theory of Keynes, which has failed to fix broken economies whenever it's been tried, will finally be discredited and die after the biggest failure of them all and the fall of Barack Obama. Consider the following signs:
Keynes died on April 21, 1946 at age 62. When Obama was elected President and sworn into office it was 62 years from Keynes' death. But a stronger and more persuasive sign of Keynsianism's coming demise is the fact that the passage of Obama's massive stimulus by the Democrat led Senate on the ominous day of Friday the 13th was exactly 22,944 days from Keynes's death, a number that significantly ends in 44 Obama's presidential number, hence:
April 21, 1946 to February 13, 2009=62 years, 9 months and 23 days, or 22,944.
Moreover, it was the Democrat controlled 111th Congress that passed ARRA the greatest and grandest Keynesian stimulus experiment in history. Amazingly, when Keynes died on April 21, 1946 it was the 111th day of the year, indicating in my view that the 111th Congress is killing Keynesianism for good.
Massive government intervention and deficit spending to stimulate consumption and demand failed for Herbert Hoover, FDR, George W. Bush (see below) and most spectacularly the Japanese who are in the 20th year of a protracted recession after spending billions in stimulus funds and going into massive debt of just under 200% of GDP. Government spending to stimulate enough demand for goods and services to revive a weak economy works beautifully in theory. But 73 years after Keynes published his General Theory Keynesians can't point to a single success story in practice. NOT ONE. And it will be no different for the economic, deficit exploding, clueless illiterate in the White House who is giving the word insanity new meaning.
Postscript: Bush's Stimulus
Foreshadowing the coming failure of Obama's colossal stimulus package was George Bush's smaller stimulus of early 2008. Strangely and amazingly this stimulus bill, amounting to $162 billion in mostly tax rebates to working Americans, was signed by Bush on February 13th (see) exactly one year before the inauspicious day the Senate passed Obama's bill (see). The failure of Bush's stimulus to stave off a recession should have been warning enough to Obama and the Democrats about the futility of going down that path again. But following loony, Neo-Keyensian economists like Paul Krugman Obama Team concluded that the Bush stimulus was too small and would have to be significantly larger if it were to work. It is fascinating to note that Bush was born in 1946 just 76 days after Keynes' death*. Bush's failed stimulus should have been the death of Keynes in this country once and for all. But Keynes lives on in the stupendous, colossal blunder called Obamanomics.
*Bush was born 7-6-1946. Also interesting is that Bush's last Secretary of Treasury, Henry Paulson, who pushed Bush on the stimulus and TARP, was born March 28, 1946 24 days before Keynes' death.