In early December, I asked whether President Obama would choose to be more like Hoover, or more like FDR. Well, I guess it’s definitely Hoover.
The President believes that Federal dollars for a jobs program necessary to end The Great Recession are limited. He can only believe that because he believes that the Federal Government has to either tax or borrow to get those dollars. This belief is false, and it can’t provide either a rationale or an excuse for not funding as large-scale a jobs program as Americans need to go back to work.
The posture that The Government can only do so much to lower unemployment in this recession, because its dollars are limited is not the kind of language we ought to be hearing from a Democratic President. It is the kind of language we are used to hearing from Mike Spence, or Judd Gregg, or Mitch McConnell, or Peter G. Peterson, or some other Neanderthal, and not from a Democratic President who supposedly believes in the usefulness of Government in addressing serious social and economic problems. Also, the idea that our spending must be limited because we have solvency problems is false. A nation sovereign in its own currency, like ours, can never fail to meet to its obligations, because it can always just spend and in the act of spending create new money.
The ideas that are dollars are limited and that we can run out of money, is the idea behind the posture of Herbert Hoover, a really fine man, with more than a few progressive instincts. Unfortunately, hamstrung himself into accepting the slide into depression by his commitment to free market ideology and his belief that he had to wait for the private economy to prove that “prosperity is just around the corner.” Obama often sounds like Hoover, asking those without a job, with much reduced or no income, with shredded hopes and lives, and with severely damaged futures to be patient while his earlier inadequate stimulus package does its work, and while he does very little to alleviate their present difficulties, but takes care to bailout the banks, allow the payment of obscene bonuses to financial system traders, bailout the health insurance companies, and sees to it that no one who has committed any crimes in getting s into our various current difficulties is ever prosecuted. Can anyone imagine FDR acting the way Obama is acting now? Or would he, in contrast, be devising measure after measure to create jobs and prime the economy, and bullying the Congress to pass those measures? He was a real leader of a nation in trouble. Why is Obama failing to follow his example? Why is he playing Hoover instead?
(Cross-posted at Fiscal Sustainability and and All Life Is Problem Solving)