On Sunday night, President-elect Barack Obama told CBS' "60 Minutes" that Franklin D. Roosevelt would be a model of sorts for him. "What you see in FDR that I hope my team can emulate is not always getting it right, but projecting a sense of confidence, and a willingness to try things. And experiment in order to get people working again."As Goldberg points out, it's just a hop, skip, and jump, from projecting a sense of confidence and not always getting it right to arrogant incompetence - just what Bush critics have been wailing about for eight years.
But, as Goldberg also writes, what our markets need now is some sense of security about what government is going to be doing. Can you imagine making investment and business decisions in this atmosphere? You don't know what the Democrats are going to do regarding taxes. Which companies are going to receive bailouts and which won't? Henry Paulson certainly hasn't contributed to a sense of confidence about what the government is going to be doing.
One of the main reasons there's all of this "money on the sidelines" out there among private investors is that Wall Street doesn't know what the government will do next. Will it bail out the auto industry? The insurance companies? Which taxes will go up? How far will interest rates go down? How long will the federal government own stakes in the banks? Will more stimulus checks go out? If so, how big will the deficit get?Obama may have confidence in the ability of government to solve economic problems. I doubt if business leaders around the country share that confidence.
Interventionists, bailout czars and "bold experimenters" in all parties claim to be like firefighters; they can't stop what they're doing until the fire is out. But this analogy only works if you understand the nature of the fire. If it's a credit crisis, that's one thing. If it's uncertainty, it's quite another.
And if the problem right now is uncertainty, then these aren't firefighters, they're arsonists.
Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson told Congress he'd spend his kitty of tax dollars on bad mortgage-backed securities. Instead, in the spirit of bold experimentation, he's spent much of it to date buying banks.
Obama insisted he had a specific plan for the economy -- but his plan seems to be to "project confidence."
The problem with this "In Obama We Trust" approach is that it makes private-sector decision-making very difficult. If your boss says he will lay off half his employees next month, but he doesn't know who yet, will you buy a new house this month?
In a time of stability and growth, government can afford bold, persistent experimentation. But in a time of uncertainty, the last thing it needs is more uncertainty. Yet Obama's confident pragmatism, like FDR's, is a threat to confidence where it matters -- among consumers, credit markets and investors.
Yes, letting GM go into bankruptcy would be scary. But a GM bailout merely kicks GM's problems down the road while spreading the contagion about where Uncle Sam's big feet will land next. Besides, bankruptcy isn't the end of the world. It's the means by which bad companies restructure to fix themselves. Bailouts are the means by which governments subsidize bad companies.
The engine company in Washington has pumped more than a trillion dollars through the fire hose. It's time to turn off the spigot, not only to see where we are but to let the normal people start fixing things.
10 comments:
FDR's silly experimenting caused unnecessary suffering for tens of millions of Americans.
Yes, seven extra years added to the Great Depression.
Part of it was that FDR kept changing the rules. The other part was that he thought wages and prices were too low, so he encouraged price fixing.
You're completely missing the point - Obama was talking about the need to be humble, to accept that he might not always be right, and therefore to be willing to change when that happens.
That is about the 180 degree opposite of George W. Bush and his GOP disaster.
FDR did not "add seven extra years" to the Great Depression. His careful stewardship was greatly improving conditions for Americans, until he gave into fundie right wingers and tried to do it on a balanced budget. Revisionism like Larry's means never learning from past mistake -- classic George W. Bush jr.
Among FDR's stupid ideas:
- Pay farmers not to grow food. Still a disaster.
- Seized gold owned by Americans and raised the price of gold believing the price of gold determined the price of food. A disaster because it screwed up international trade and made it more difficult to sell American goods overseas.
- Imposed a "retained earings" tax. That is a tax on savings. Want to save up for a new machine or a new building? Not possible because your savings were seized by FDR. A disaster.
- As Larryd noted, when demand drops for labor, the cost of labor should decline, but FDR raised the cost of labor forcing companies to fire more employees and not to hire them back. A disaster.
FDR's people also forced owners to sell their companies if they were operating in competition (Profitably) to the TVA (There may be other instances. This is the only situation I know of.)
Yeah, but let's think about this about more deeply, instead of nitpicking aspects of what FDR may or may not have done.
Here's a quote from a tv program. I don't watch much tv. I read a lot though, including newspapers from around the world, including some in foreign languages. Though this is from a fictional character, the words are true:
"Liberals got women the right to vote. (President Woodrow Wilson, progressive democrat).
Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote.
Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty.
Liberals ended segregation.
Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act.
Liberals created Medicare.
Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act.
What did conservatives do? They opposed liberals on every one of those things; every one.
If you enjoy a 5-day work week, instead of 6 days, thank a union member and a liberal for their work to achieve that.
At least have the honesty to source the quote and not try to pass off part of it as your own words. But I like this trusting faith in relying on the words of a fictional character from The West Wing. Does that mean that when Peter Pan asks for everyone to clap their hands to bring Tinkerbelle back to life you also clap along.
1. Women's suffrage was part of the Republican party platform since the end of the Civil War and when it passed it was because a Republican Senate finally gave the measure enough votes to send it to the states for ratification. Wilson ran as a Southern Democrat who reinstituted segregation in the Civil Service and signed a bill making interracial marriages a crime in DC.
2,4, and 5. Republicans passed the 14th Amendment which banned slavery and extended suffrage to all adult male blacks. If you are referring to the voting reform acts of the 60s' then credit must go to both parties, especially the Republicans who voted for both measures with a higher percentage of votes then the Democrats. The final conference bills were written by Sen. Dirksen a Republican from Illinois. Plus it should be obvious that the segregated South was run by Southern Democrats and change was only possible by cooperation between Northern Democrats and Republicans.
3. Democrats or liberals can certainly take credit for the passage of the Social Security Act but not to often do they also mention that the act withdrew nearly $2 billion in cash from the economy which reacted by causing a recession that lasted and was in some ways just as bad as the worst days of the Depression. This "Roosevelt Recession" lasted until war production started a hiring boom that basically put America back on its feet again. It could be argued that the liberal policies of the New Deal only became succesful when the US became a war profiteer.
6. The Medicare rider to a Social Security reform bill in 1965 was championed by both Democrats and Republicans, though both obviously differed on what form the bill would take. The final bill was the result of the continued opposition to a universal health care or insurance came from the head of the House Ways and Means Committee, a Democrat from Arkansas, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act, Wilbur Mills. A good example of politics in that the final bill looked nothing like what they had set out to create but again needed Republican votes to pass.
7. Again Liberals are claiming something that had its roots in the Progressive Era which was primarily a movement by moderate good government type Republicans and Democrats who introduced many bills aimed at clean water and clean air but here much credit should go not only to TR but to California and Pennsylvania who began passing anti-pollution bills years before the national government did. Plus the two acts under discussion were both at the behest of the Nixon Administration.
8. Members of the American socialist movement began arguing for a reduced work week during the 1870's taking their cue from Marx and Engels who argued that the only way to make the worker aware of his status was to give him time to be "educated". However it was that noted liberal Henry Ford who essentially created the 8 hour day and the 5 day work week in 1926 while the liberals of the day were still getting Potemking village tours of the Soviet Union and discussing the many benefits that Scientific Socialism could bring to the US. The UAW was not even created until 1935 so claiming this reform as a benefit created by unions is a nonstarter.
Perhaps you should read what I wrote more carefully before accusing me of trying to pass that quote off as my own, Pat.
I recall you recently had similar comprehension problems with certain founding documents, and needed my correction there too.
Not really, the plagarism begins with, "Here's a quote from a tv program." Then there is one quotation mark at the beginning of the list, parentheses that were not in the original quote and there is no concluding quotation mark. But again I notice that there is no real response to a factual refutation of your list.
Roosevelt ran promising a balanced budget in 1932. AS did the Democrats when they took over Congress in 1930. Much later he had to make deals with southern Democrats because the liberal wing of the Democrats simply turned against him whenever he tried to govern from the center without nationalizing everything in sight.
Plus, Bill you need to keep a list of your aliases else you identify the source of all the sock puppetry.
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