Christmas...will it still be Merry in 2009?

Hat-Tip to Texas Fred and fly at night

Big Corporate Bail-outs? Aren't they the guys at the top? Whatever happened to "build from the bottom up and not from the top down" What about the little guy? What about the Forgotten Man? Oh, I see...trying to replicate FDR's New Deal...the mess that started it all...a repeat will end it all! - Storm'n Norm'n

Obama - The New FDR?

We continue to hear from the left that this is the worst economy since the Great Depression. In fact, we only need to go back to Carter to have a relevant comparison. This is simply a scare tactic similar to the “Repubs will take away your Social Security” – a mainstay in the Democratic playbook.

I have listened to Obama over the past two years and found his statements to be familiar. Like his acceptance speech, there were lines that I thought came from a movie called The American President…

Alas, I opened a book by Amity Shlaes (The Forgotten Man) and found this by Gov. Franklin Roosevelt, April 7, 1932:

These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power, for plans like those of 1917 that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid. (my emphasis)

The book continues:

January 8, 1934, page xvi

Supreme Court upholds the legality of the Minnesota Mortgage Moratorium Act in Home Building & Loan Assn. v Blaisdell. Passed in response to the farm foreclosures resulting from the Depression, the Act allows individuals unable to make prompt payments to turn to the courts’ weakening contracts.

June 28, 1934, page xvii

New Federal Farm Bankruptcy Act permits moratoria on mortgage foreclosures.

November 6, 1934

Democrats win two-thirds majority in Senate and make significant gains in house, strengthening Roosevelt’s position.

From that point even more government programs were created.

February 5, 1937, page xx

In reaction to Supreme Court’s recent decisions against New Deal programs, FDR announces the Federal Court Reorganization bill, his court-packing proposal.

I guess the courts simply weren’t doing their “job” to allow and unfettered expansion of the Progressive Movement even though the program ran contrary to the Constitution.

Even though the Democrats gained a veto proof majority and passed sweeping New Deal Programs, the Depression continued on until at least 1939 when another world war was in the making.

It appears that Obama is not so transformational as much as he fashions himself as the successor to FDR. The danger is that his programs might work in the same fashion as FDR and we could find ourselves in a less than stellar economy for years to come.

On May 27, 1938, page xxi

Roosevelt delivers speech assailing Congress for voting to cut taxes and accuses lawmakers of abandoning principle of progressive taxation.

Let us not forget that in the early days Obama considered $1 million to be the rich then that was scaled down to $250,000, last night he made that number $200,000, and last week Biden made it $150,000. The number will continue to diminish until the magic $1 trillion per year of new revenues that are needed to invest in his sweeping new programs is achieved.

Just a thought.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 ....