Brain on ice. Image of Obama's frozen brain.
In his State of a Less Perfect Union speech tomorrow the Great Depressor, who is everywhere making things worse, is to announce his bold new plan to freeze out of control spending at its current out of control levels; which means that spending will still be in the stratosphere driving us toward bankruptcy and depression.
Meanwhile the nutballs at Huffington Post and Daily Kos are comparing Obama's proposal to the "heartless, do nothing" policies of Herbert Hoover who before FDR was the biggest spending liberal President in US peacetime history* (Hooverism was the New Deal in embryo as Harold Ickes said). Indeed, the crazies are sounding the alarm and warning Obama about a reapeat of the catastrophe of 1937 when FDR scaled back spending prior to the New Deal crashing and the economy plunging into a new recession (within the Depression)-when millions lost jobs in the private sector due, in reality, to the Wagner Act, one million business crippling strike hours, collective bargaining, punishing corporate taxes and the minimum wage-all converging to collapse the stock market then the economy. The causal relationship between this downturn and spending cuts has never been proved or adequately explained, and never will.
* In the 1932 election campaign FDR ran as a fiscal conservative against Hoover's run away spending and huge deficits only to outspend Hoover once in office. Hoover's policies turned a recession started by the Federal Reserve into the Depression; then FDR, who was Hoover on steroids, needlessly prolonged the Depression for many years with his ruinous failed New Deal.
The Left is howling that Obama is moderating and being Hooverized, Clintonized and triangularized when in fact he's settling for a lesser degree of spending psychosis that has FDR and Keynes himself rolling in their graves. Not everyone in the loony bin are equally insane. There are ultra-diehard Keynesian crackpots like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich*, more extreme than Obama calling for an escalation in stimulus spending, who make him seem normal, mainstream and sane. It's a bogus Obama make over game, like his tough Nobel Prize neo-con speech at Oslo-another smile and lie routine to fool the folks into thinking that he's one of them and not elitist; that he's riding the wave of public outrage over spending and soaring deficits. The times call for radical change in priorities and direction (not deception) which is what Scott Brown, New Jersey and Virginia were about. Not tone deaf but brain dead. Obama has a frozen brain stuck in a past that is perishing.
*These men are crackpots believing in what I call Hocus Pocus Economics: The magical and mystical blind faith based belief that government can barrow, spend and tax its way out of economic difficulties. Ask these men for one historical example proving their theory and they say that it has nerver truly been put into practice because no government to date has spent the money needed to make it work, including the trillions spent by the Three Blind Mice: Obama, Pelosi and Reid.