Republicans Go Back to Hoover in Response to Obama’s Stimulus Bill
The Republicans have turned to Herbert Hoover for advice on Obama’s economic recovery plan.
Defying all economic sense since the Great Depression, they’ve dusted off Hoover’s ruinous policies and are now presenting them as fiscal sense.
“Government can’t fix this,” said John Boehner on Meet the Press. “It’s a lot of spending that I just don’t think will work.”
John McCain was reading from the same script to Chris Wallace on Fox. “We're going to lay an additional $2 trillion of debt on future Americans,” he said. “We've got to eliminate the unnecessary spending."
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who gave the Republican response to Obama’s radio address Saturday, stressed “holding the line on spending” and “balancing the budget.”
To follow this Republican advice would send the economy straight into a depression.
The private sector is shedding jobs by the thousands every day. But Republicans would rather have people be unemployed by the private sector than employed by the public sector. (Rep. Rodgers insisted that every single job that the economic recovery plan creates be in the private sector.)
Only the federal government has the resources to stave off the disaster that will surely befall us if we let the free market take us further over the cliff.
The Republicans keep reiterating Hooverisms.
Why?
Because they’re ideologically bankrupt.
And because worried that Obama’s stimulus may actually work. And they don’t want him—or the Democrats—to get the credit.
As Rush Limbaugh put it on January 23, “Obama’s plan would buy votes for the Democrat Party, in the same way FDR’s New Deal established majority power for 50 years of Democrat rule.”
Limbaugh’s been upfront, saying, “I hope he fails.”
Republican leaders in Congress are not quite that crude.
But they mean the same thing.
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Comments
It's odd you talk of Hoover's "ruinous policies" without ever specifying what they were. I suppose you assume your readers are up to speed on that. That is, that they buy the utterly bogus notion that Hoover was a free market advocate for no government intervention in the economy. I wonder how you or they would explain Hoover's Reconstruction Finance Corps, or his Smoot-Hawley tariff, or his meetings with business to badger them into maintaining high wages as prices and profits plummeted, a sure recipe for adding to unemployment, which it did. Hoover was a meddling engineer who thought he knew better than the private sector at every turn. Whatever the relationship of the current economic crunch and the Great Depression (not that much), or the relationship between the current bailouts and stimulus packages and FDR's multiple, largely ineffective, efforts (except for masterful saving of the banking and financial sector), your propagandistic use of Hoover is laughable in every respect.
Moreover, it utterly disregards the fact that Republicans are complaining much more about how LITTLE Obama plans to spend this year out of his stimulus package than how much the package is. As for all this deficit financing, you do not seem much interested in the weakness of the multiplier concept used to justify it. Nor to the very important fact that it is going to set Obama up to have to curtail the true disaster looming, the Social Security and Medicare crunch. As a neocon, I am not at all upset about the bailout or the stimulus spending now, where it is needed (if done right -- another matter) because I am reasonably sure it is going to force America finally to confront and contract these runaway entitlements, restructure them and finally start to put America back on the road to fiscal rationality.