Obama's Fiscal Stimulus Plan and FDR's Legacy

The London Independent's Johann Hari pens a brief but mighty piece on HuffPost showing how the massive spending FDR initiated at the outset of the Great Depression was the medicine that our ailing country needed. President Obama wants to do very much the same thing by massive spending on national infrastructure and a low-carbon economy, and Republicans are trotting the same old tired arguments about slashing spending and cutting taxes. The Reaganites of the late 1970s tried to revise history by asserting that the New Deal didn't work. Hari points out, however, that when FDR caved into conservative pressure, the momentum of the recovery reversed itself. He later reimplemented massive public spending and recovery got back on track. It was the onset of WWII that got us out of the Depression (again, more public spending). He ran up record budget deficits (for that time) but his massive public spending launched a huge economic boom period that eclipsed all that.

It was Reagan, and then GW Bush, who ran our economy into the ground by slashing spending and cutting taxes. Investors and wealthy people who enjoyed the benefits of these economic times simply built more wealth for themselves. The rest of us tried to keep up as our real income dropped and our personal debt soared. We mirrored the government's deficit spending and created one hell of a mess. Hence the massive recessions of the late 1980s and now.

Of course, Republicans always want to take credit for boom times that occur during the watch of a Democratic president, and blame that Democratic president when things go south on their watch.

As someone who has made a pretty good living when times were good, I certainly understand the desire to hold onto more of that money by paying less taxes. This is especially true when my government spends my tax money on programs and policies that run counter to my political leanings. But if I were spending as much of my income on debt service than the federal government, I'd sell my house and rent until I could right the ship, as it were.

So when I see Republican leaders in the House and Senate on TV criticizing the Obama plan, I tune it out as just another rerun of a show that failed to connect the first time it ran.