Clinton, with a side of Hoover.

What we learned from President Herbert Hoover is that the worst thing one can do when in an economic slump, especially a big one such as the 1929 market crash, is to raise taxes. Raising taxes discourages growth, expansion, spending and most importantly, hiring. So, one must wonder what’s going to be the result of this policy:

Obama’s First Budget Seeks To Trim Deficit
Plan Would Cut War Spending, Increase Taxes on the Wealthy
By Lori Montgomery and Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 22, 2009; A01

President Obama is putting the finishing touches on an ambitious first budget that seeks to cut the federal deficit in half over the next four years, primarily by raising taxes on businesses and the wealthy and by slashing spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, administration officials said.

In addition to tackling a deficit swollen by the $787 billion stimulus package and other efforts to ease the nation’s economic crisis, the budget blueprint will press aggressively for progress on the domestic agenda Obama outlined during the presidential campaign. This would include key changes to environmental policies and a major expansion of health coverage that he hopes to enact later this year.

That’s the “side of Clinton” in the post title — Clinton cut defense spending from about 4.6% of gross domestic product in 1992 to just over 3%. That’s the only way they achieved any surplus, and the notion that Clinton’s tax increase did that is a bald-faced myth. Indeed, the economy under Clinton didn’t make its greatest jumps until he signed the Gingrich House Republicans capital gains tax cut in 1997.

So, Obama seems to be warming up his go-back machine, except with some new wrinkles: Free health care, curb energy consumption but we’ll slash the military budget to do that.

Crazy. At least Bill Clinton had some history on his side. The Cold War was finally over. That’s what the Reagan defense build up purchased Clinton, the opportunity to spend less on defense and create a surplus the only way Democrats knew how. But Obama isn’t going to get the grace Clinton received. 9-11 changed everything. Or did it? Apparently it didn’t change a thing for some.