Griper Blade: Learning from Hoover

There's been some worry that Barack Obama would have to put aside his middle class tax cuts to help pay for an ambitious economic stimulus package. The budget deficit would be too big, the argument goes, and this will cause the economy to suffer. You wonder where all these deficit hawks have been for the last eight years. Bush spent money like a drunk in a strip club on his big pet project of rebuilding the middle east in the neocons' image, driving deficits up to historic levels. In return for this massive investment, we've got pretty much nothing. We might as well have piled up money on the capital mall and lit it on fire.

And now that the failures of the new Republican fiscal policy have destroyed our economy, we're being asked to return to those same policies to fix it. It was John McCain who proposed cutting spending (domestic spending, that is -- we'd still shoveling money into Iraq) in response to the market downturn. In fact, he promised a balanced budget. You know who the last president was who decided to balance the federal budget in a recession? Herbert Hoover. It didn't work.

McCain, more concerned with attracting conservatives than dealing with reality, made a politically motivated choice to run on reducing spending and eliminating earmarks. Nothing could've been worse. "If we were as ignorant as we were in the 1930s, I think we could be facing a second Great Depression," economist Paul Krugman said in a interview on CBS's Face The Nation Sunday. "Really, the only reason that we're not headed for Great Depression II -- at least I don't think we are -- is that we think we learned a few things since then. So we're not trying to balance the federal budget in the face of a recession. But this is big stuff. This is the worst thing, you know, in two lifetimes." In other words, we've learned from Hoover's mistakes -- at least, some of us have... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]