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by Paul Krugman
Here’s the situation: The U.S.
economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The president’s
policies
have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment
remains disastrously high.
More action is clearly needed. Yet the public has soured on government
activism, and seems poised
to deal Democrats a severe defeat in the midterm elections.
The president in question is Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the year is
1938. Within a few years, of course,
the Great Depression was over. But it’s both instructive and
discouraging to look at the state of America
circa 1938 — instructive because the nature of the recovery that
followed refutes the arguments dominating
today’s public debate, discouraging because it’s hard to see anything
like the miracle of the 1940s happening again.
Now, we weren’t supposed to find ourselves replaying the late 1930s.
President Obama’s economists
promised not to repeat the mistakes of 1937, when F.D.R. pulled back
fiscal stimulus too soon. But by
making his program too small and too short-lived, Mr. Obama did just
that: the stimulus raised growth
while it lasted, but it made only a small dent in unemployment — and
now it’s fading out.
And just as some of us feared, the inadequacy of the administration’s
initial economic plan has landed it
— and the nation — in a political trap. More stimulus is
desperately needed, but in the public’s eyes the
failure of the initial program to deliver a convincing recovery has
discredited government action to create jobs.
In short, welcome to 1938.
I keep reading, "Now that the
federal tax incentives for housing are over, the market is flat,"
and "Now that
the cash-for-clunkers program is over, car sales are flat." and
so on.
Why did Obama let those two great jobs-creating programs
fade away?
I believe it's because The Bitch and The Boner didn't like them.
Tally says we should be nicer to Obama, but when is he going to ACT instead of
kissing GOP ass?
Obama needs to learn how to say, "*I* won the
election, you can go fuck yourself,"
but he wants to be nice to the people who hate him and want America to
fail.