Deja Vu

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Runaway Stimulus

As Will points out, we have been here before -- many times. How far will we fall and how fast? Nobody knows that. Will we recover? Nobody really knows that either. Unless our descent is total and "complete" -- say terrorist attack with Smallpox that takes out 70% of the population or so, there will likely be some sort of "tomorrow" that some living today will be around to recognize, but from this vantage, it is looking to me like the likely aftermath of this "change" may exceed any pain in the history of the US.

Lincoln is good for magnitude -- but maybe consider Jefferson Davis, or what would have ensued if Lincoln had LOST the Civil War? Think of the Post BO US as maybe Atlanta after Sherman.

Forget FDR, think Hitler. The  blind cheering crowds for "Change", "Hope", "Yes We Can" and the speed of the drive to the politicization of all while claiming "all is beyond politics" is so reminiscent of the Third Reich that one has to be willfully ignorant of history to fail to see the parallel. Think Berlin after WWII.

Will points out one that I would not have come up with:

Not yet a third of the way through the president's "first 100 days," he
and we should remember that it was not FDR's initial burst of activity
in 1933 that put the phrase "100 days" into the Western lexicon. It was
Napoleon's frenetic trajectory in 1815 that began with his escape from
Elba and ended near the Belgian village of Waterloo.

This last quote makes the same point I've made a number of times -- the parallel to the period of '65 to '82. My current prayer is that we can sneak by somehow with ONLY that level of despair and destruction -- my reason tells me that we may likely end up wishing for something as "mild" as the '30s or even the Civil War. BO as Lincoln indeed.

In December 1965, John Maynard Keynes, although 19 years dead, was,
as today, enjoying one of his recurring resurrections as vindicator of
government management of the economy by manipulating "aggregate
demand." Keynes' visage was on Time magazine's cover and the
accompanying story said that happy days were here again and here to
stay.

President Lyndon Johnson was embarked on building the Great
Society, assisted by policymakers who, wrote Time, "have used Keynesian
principles" to smooth the moderate business cycles and achieve price
stability: "Washington's economic managers scaled these heights by
their adherence to Keynes' central theme" that a modern economy can
operate at "top efficiency" only with government "intervention and
influence." So, "economists have descended in force from their ivory
towers and now sit confidently at the elbow of almost every important
leader in government and business, where they are increasingly called
upon to forecast, plan and decide." Ten years later, the "misery index"
-- the unemployment rate plus the inflation rate -- was 19.9, heading
for 22 percent in 1980.