Dick Morris wrote an op-ed for TheHill.com basically saying Obama is bringing socialism to America. Will he just shut up about the socialist meme already. This guy would sell his own mother just for the opportunity to give a shout out to his website.
In implementing his agenda, Barack Obama will emulate the example of Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Not the liberal mythology of the New Deal, but the actuality of what it accomplished.) When FDR took office, he was enormously successful in averting a total collapse of the banking system and the economy. But his New Deal measures only succeeded in lowering the unemployment rate from 23 percent in 1933, when he took office, to 13 percent in the summer of 1937. It never went lower. And his policies of over-regulation generated such business uncertainty that they triggered a second-term recession. Unemployment in 1938 rose to 17 percent and, in 1940, on the verge of the war-driven recovery, stood at 15 percent. (These data and the real story of Hoover’s and Roosevelt’s missteps, uncolored by ideology, are available in The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes, copyright 2007.)
Now I recommend bonddad's series on The Great Depression that completely invalidates this spin being applied by Morris. The New Deal was extremely successful by most measures. This is the type of spin being propagated by the right in order to rewrite history. The second recession in 1937 was from a pull back in spending and an attempt to balance the budget.
But in the name of a largely unsuccessful effort to end the Depression, Roosevelt passed crucial and permanent reforms that have dominated our lives ever since, including Social Security, the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, unionization under the Wagner Act, the federal minimum wage and a host of other fundamental changes.
Ok, so let me get this straight. In one sentence you are criticizing FDR for the new deal and the next you give a list of things that almost every American would agree are needed intervention by the government. Why dont you make up your mind and stop trying to invent things to try and criticize a successful program.
Obama’s record will be similar, although less wise and more destructive. He will begin by passing every program for which liberals have lusted for decades, from alternative-energy sources to school renovations, infrastructure repairs and technology enhancements. These are all good programs, but they normally would be stretched out for years. But freed of any constraint on the deficit — indeed, empowered by a mandate to raise it as high as possible — Obama will do them all rather quickly.
So tell me how building schools and replacing aging infrastructure is destructive. I dont know but Dick is starting to sound like he has no grip on reality.
But it is not his spending that will transform our political system, it is his tax and welfare policies. In the name of short-term stimulus, he will give every American family (who makes less than $200,000) a welfare check of $1,000 euphemistically called a refundable tax credit. And he will so sharply cut taxes on the middle class and the poor that the number of Americans who pay no federal income tax will rise from the current one-third of all households to more than half. In the process, he will create a permanent electoral majority that does not pay taxes, but counts on ever-expanding welfare checks from the government. The dependency on the dole, formerly limited in pre-Clinton days to 14 million women and children on Aid to Families with Dependent Children, will now grow to a clear majority of the American population.
Obama has said multiple times that only working families would recieve the tax credit. So tell me how a hard working family getting a tax cut is welfare. When its a tax cut to the rich its always good but when its a tax cut for the middle class its welfare? Get your head out of your ass.
Will he raise taxes? Why should he? With a congressional mandate to run the deficit up as high as need be, there is no reason to raise taxes now and risk aggravating the depression. Instead, Obama will follow the opposite of the Reagan strategy. Reagan cut taxes and increased the deficit so that liberals could not increase spending. Obama will raise spending and increase the deficit so that conservatives cannot cut taxes. And, when the economy is restored, he will raise taxes with impunity, since the only people who will have to pay them would be rich Republicans.
Ok thats it Morris has gone off the deep end. He either makes himself look stupid or prove progressives right by saying Reagans policies did not work.
Reagan cut taxes and increased the deficit so that liberals could not increase spending.
Ok so Reagan cut taxes to run up the deficit? That just invalidates the conservative argument. Or you could take that sentence the other way Reagan spent to raise the deficit and that wouldn't make him conservative. Im not even gonna bother anymore this isnt even coherent anymore.