Here’s George Will:
In February 2008, President George W. Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who normally were at daggers drawn, agreed that a $168 billion stimulus — this was Stimulus I — would be the “booster shot” the economy needed. Unemployment then was 4.8 percent.
In January, the Obama administration, shiny as a new dime and bursting with brains, said that unless another stimulus — Stimulus II wound up involving $787 billion — was passed immediately, unemployment, which then was 7.6 percent, would reach 9 percent by 2010. But halfway through 2009, the rate is 9.5. For the first time since the now 16-nation “euro zone” was established in 1999, the unemployment rate in America is as high as it is in that region, which Americans once considered a cautionary lesson on the wages of sin, understood as excessive taxation and regulation.
I want you to keep that unemployment-rate-despite-government-action in mind.
As I continue to read The Forgotten Man, by Amity Shales, I’m blown away by two repeated points: (1) Everything I was taught about Hoover, FDR and The Great Depression in school was wrong — Hoover was FDR Lite, not his opposite. And, (2), in many ways the Bush to Obama transition is parallel to the Hoover to FDR transition.
For example, FDR expanded many government construction projects that Hoover started, such as the Hoover Dam, which FDR’s cronies renamed as “the Boulder dam,” in order to take attention away from that fact.
Shales continues:
There were further commonalities. Hoover had spent on public hospitals and bridges; Roosevelt created a post of relief administrator for the Republican progressive Harry Hopkins. Hoover had loved public works; Roosevelt created a public works administration… Hoover had was a problem created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation [RFC]; Roosevelt put Jones’s at the head of the RFC so that he might address the debt…. Hoover had wanted to pass legislation to help farmers. So did Roosevelt. “What it was all over,” [New Deal agriculture adviser Rex] Tugwell would later write,” I once made a list of you deal with ventures begun during Hoover’s years as secretary of commerce and then as president… the New Deal owed much to what he had begun.”
Yet other projects were mere gentle departures from Hoover. Hoover had encouraged families to tend the substance gardens so that they might feed themselves with their own vegetables. Roosevelt instructed [Interior Sec. Harold] Ickes to develop a substance homestead project where families might feed themselves on new farms. Hoover had signed a Glass-Steagall banking act in 1932, to expand credit; Roosevelt now prepared his own Glass-Steagall act.
Hoover had deplored the shorting of Wall Street’s rogues; Roosevelt set his brain trusters to writing a law that would create a regulator for Wall Street. The new securities and exchange commission [SEC] would turn the stock market from a free for all the hazy rules into a more comprehensible game, one of which a small player had a more fairer shot. Hoover had expanded public works to create jobs; Roosevelt too would create jobs and relief programs. Hoover had not cared much about prohibition, and neither did Roosevelt; he now sought to end it.
Much to the chagrin of true economic conservatives, Bush began a stimulus, Obama greatly expanded it; Bush started TARP, Obama expanded it; Bush expanded the scope of government in both size and domain, he advanced expensive legislation such as the new Medicare prescription bill. Despite his power to do so, he never vetoed government spending or bills that hurt private enterprise, from CAFE initiatives to carbon-trading concepts. Bush is Hoover. Obama is FDR. And 7 years from now we might all still be stuck with near (or worse) double-digit unemployment.