By, Nancy Tengler
Have you ever had that feeling sweep over you that you have been in the very same place before? That out-of-body, deja vu realization that something was happening that had happened before?
While reading Amity Shlaes’ history of the FDR Administration, The Forgotten Man I have experienced instance upon instance of that very sensation. I find myself checking the publication date again and again: 2007. She published the book in 2007, wrote it in the years leading up to 2007. While Bush was still president. Before Obama was the certain Democrat candidate, the president. There is no way she could have molded the narrative to fit our current political situation. No way she could have known just how eerily similar Obama’s policies would be to FDR’s. She is brilliant but she is not psychic.
The latest wave of deja vu came when I read the following few paragraphs.
- “As Roosevelt in 1936 would freely acknowledge to another adviser, the election was about a single issue–Roosevelt (249).It seems that everything political over the past 20 or so months has been about one thing: Obama. There is no other way to view the bulldozing through of ObamaCare. He, in fact, said so himself. The Founders anticipated leaders like Obama and FDR. Madison wrote in Federalist 10: “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” And, thus they provided an intricate set of checks and balances to mitigate tyranny. Hamilton summarized, perhaps, the most effective check against tyranny in Federalist 22: “The fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of the THE CONSENT OF THE PEOPLE. The streams of national power ought to flow immediately from that pure, original fountain of all legitimate authority.” In other words, it is about us, not the Me occupying the White House.
- The president (FDR) relished squeezing cash for the poor out of the well-to-do…The country was splitting into those who were Roosevelt favorites and everyone else. The division started at the top” (248-249). So obviously similar to what we are experiencing today and anticipated by the Founders. They understood that the very nature of man ensured society would have factions. The owners, the renters, the employer the employee, the religious, the atheist. Society (government) should not inflame the factions, increase the chasm of separation as FDR did and as Obama is doing, rather government should seek as Madison proposes in Federalist 10 “to control its effects. “Justice,” he wrote ought to hold the balance between them.”
- “He (FDR) illuminated objectives–even fantastically unrealizable objectives. These excited and inspired. When one…faded, he provided another.” The fact that he shifted did not have to matter (248). And this, too, is familiar. Obama talks of jobs, then health care, then castigates the rich, then castigates the Republicans, then talks of the need for increased spending to stimulate, then lectures on religious freedom, back to health care, jobs again, more stimulus. Each speech overflowing with the pronoun “I.” Ever focused on himself, his legacy, his agenda. One new idea after another. Spinning. Spinning.
Out of control.
By, Nancy Tengler
“Roosevelt had played around with economics, and economics hadn’t served him very well. He would therefore give up on the discipline and concentrate on an area he knew better, politics.”
The Forgotten Man by, Amity Shlaes (246)
At almost precisely the same point in his first term as Roosevelt was in his, Obama seems to be shifting from playing around with the economy, to hard-boiled, special interest politics. Economics hasn’t served him very well so he is returning to the divisive accusation-driven speeches that hallmarked his campaign.
Back to Shlaes for a moment: “If he (FDR) followed his political instincts, furiously converting ephemeral bits of legislation into solid law for specific groups of voters, then he would win reelection. He would focus on farmers, big labor, pensioners, veterans, perhaps women and blacks” (246).
This was Roosevelt’s strategy for re-election in the face of economic failures and disappointing rulings in the court against his Great Government Centralization Plan. Obama is taking the same bet. He’s just raising the stakes some with angry and accusatory rhetoric. FDR, too, lashed out at the media and Supreme Court when he lost the Schechter Brothers case to a unanimous decision signaling the death knell for the NRA. He tried castigation and abandoned it. Conciliation and clever co-opting became the new calculation. And it worked.
Luckily for us, there is not a conciliatory bone in Obama’s body.
There are more similarities. Social Security legislation was assigned to Frances Perkins of the Labor Department. This was a high priority item. Think ObamaCare in measuring its importance to the Administration. Ms. Perkins worried that she would have difficulty getting her social insurance system past the Court. A little snag called The Constitution. She confided her worry to Justice Harlan Stone. Stone gave her the following advice: “The taxing power of the federal government…is sufficient for everything you want and need” (Shlaes 229). Justice Stone was providing the critical clue to how the Court would view the Constitutional test of Social Security. If it was insurance it wouldn’t hold up. If it were simply another tax, it would meet the threshold.
In response to the various suits against the Constitutionality of ObamaCare, the government is now scrambling to take the same position.
One can hope they are just a little too clever too late. Setting your defense after the offense has already run the play doesn’t usually work out so well.
Fingers crossed, set, hike.
By, Nancy Tengler
The U.S Treasury Department calculates the federal debt held by the public. The federal debt is the money government borrows from those willing to buy U.S. Treasury notes–investors, or as the liberals like to call them: the wealthy. Those funding the federal debt, the wealthy, are the enemy of every liberal. Liberals hate the wealthy though they have no problem spending their money. Just a problem with the people who provide it. But, I digress.
For the first 200 or so years of our country’s history, from the administration of President Washington to that of President Reagan, the federal debt grew to approximately $2.1 trillion. That’s a great deal of zeros to be sure. But, President Obama, proving that he is truly the first post-sound economic policy president, among other things post, generated $2.5 trillion in publicly held debt in just 19 months raising the total debt outstanding to $8.8 trillion. In one insatiable spending binge Obama beat all the records of the first 200 years of our history in just 19 months.
Yes he did.
And what did we get for all that spending? A chicken in every pot? A BMW in every garage? Not exactly. Despite record spending and promises from the president’s economic advisers that if we spent the money unemployment would not rise above 8%, 19 months later unemployment hovers at 9.6%. The economy is growing in single digits rather than the robust growth the very same economic advisers and the president and the vice president advertised in their Summer of Recovery.
And now our economic-savant president has proposed more spending to get our economy rolling again. If that almost $900 billion stimulus bill didn’t do the trick, how about $50 billion to rev things up? That’s his plan. Oh Yes It Is.
Will it work? Not on your life.
This economy needs jobs. Private sector jobs. And to get those jobs employers need some certainty that they will not be taxed into usurious oblivion by a hostile federal government. And to increase investment in the private sector the government needs to stop sucking every last available cent out of the markets to fund its profligate deficit spending.
In short, we need tax cuts and an iron clad spending freeze. Government needs to shrink, not grow bigger.
Oh Yes It Does.
