The New New Deal

Same as the old one, as the regime tried to sneak by us over the weekend:

Democrats have been running Congress for nearly four years, and President Obama has been at the White House for eighteen months, so it’s not too soon to ask: How’s that working out? One devastating scorecard came out Friday from the White House, in the form of its own semi-annual budget review.

The message: Tax revenues are smaller, spending is greater, and the deficits are thus larger than the White House has been saying. No wonder it dumped the news on the eve of a sweltering mid-July weekend....

The White House predicts revenues will rise sharply after that, as it also assumes the economy will grow by more than 4% in each of 2012, 2013 and 2014. The last time the economy grew that rapidly for that long, however, was from 1997-2000 and from 1983-1985. In both of those cases, taxes were falling. The Obama White House plans a huge tax increase next year, followed by the ObamaCare tax hikes that hit in 2013, and that’s before whatever else the President’s deficit commission recommends. …

The Reagan Administration also pursued fiscal stimulus, but its policy choice was permanent across-the-board cuts in marginal tax rates. Revenue didn’t fall nearly as much as Keynesian economists predicted it would, and the economy roared back. Growth and spending restraint then reduced the deficit over time.

Democrats by contrast have pursued stimulus by spending and temporary tax rebates for selective constituencies. They did so first in concert with President George W. Bush, who was intellectually and politically tapped out, in February 2008. Then they did so again, on hyperdrive, with the February 2009 stimulus. They are now doing it again on a smaller scale with another burst of jobless benefits, adding some $30 billion to the deficit.

To put it another way, Democrats have been undertaking a vast fiscal policy experiment, blowing out the federal balance sheet in an effort to show that a country can spend and tax its way to prosperity. Look no further than the numbers in the White House’s own budget review for the unhappy lab results.

Ensign Ed puts this disastrous "report card" in the historical context of Jimmy Carter and the 1970s:

We have spent the past two years pursuing the policies that failed in the 1970s, such as large government interventions in labor and goods markets and the imposition of massive regulatory regimes intended to manage the economy from the top down.  We’re ignoring the policies that succeeded in the 1980s that eventually provided the antidote to the Keynesianism of the Nixon-Ford-Carter years, and that touched off a massive expansion of the American economy.

That's true, as far as it goes.  Just as it's true that many libs are ideological blind guides and dogmatists, religiously wedded to their statist beliefs beyond rationality or reason, preferring to drive the country into the ground like a meteor before admitting that they just might be wrong.

But there are those on the extreme Left who aren't just blind and stubborn.  Who, in fact, prefer to drive the country into the ground like a meteor if it will wreak sufficient havoc and destruction as to enable them to "do things you couldn't otherwise do."  Who seek absolute power over America, and seek to seize it by means of a deliberate, planned, managed, permanent economic collapse and depression.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the first Donk president to attempt this totalitarian gambit, and he was wildly successful, keeping his boot on America's throat for most of two full terms and saddling America with the permanent entitlement/welfare state before World War II got in the way and provided a way out for the U.S. economy.  Again, using that template, we've reprised the 1929 stock market crash (Panic of 2008), Dodd-Frank fills the role of the 1930 Fed in drying up credit (Oh, they irony...), and letting the Bush tax cuts expire in 2011 (plus Pelosi's revenge) would be a reasonably close domestic equivalent to the Smoot-Hawley tariff that demolished global trade by two-thirds inside of two years.

That may seem politically suicidal - why would any president want to try to seek re-election with fifteen percent unemployment and national bankruptcy not even a decade away but as close as....right after the next election? - But FDR inherited Herbert Hoover's recession, turned it into a depression, kept it that way, and was easily re-elected in 1936.  Why wouldn't B.O. think anything that old racist cracker could do, a Light-Bringing Messiah can do better?

Without further ado, I bring you today's gaffe evidence:

In an interview on ABC News’ This Week, Geithner told host Jake Tapper that coming out of such a deep economic hole, private sector job growth over the last half year was better than satisfactory.

“Right now, the best thing the government can do…is help create the conditions for the private sector to start to invest in hiring again,” he said. “Now, we’ve seen six months of positive job growth by the private sector.  That’s pretty good,” Geithner said. “Pretty good this early in a recession.

Patrick Ishmael heard the same thing I did:

We’re nearly three years into the current recession, and job growth has been so anemic that we may not return to pre-recession employment levels until 2022. Is Geithner confirming that we’re at the beginning of a fifteen year economic downturn, which by many accounts has been exacerbated by government interference? Maybe. (Sounds eerily familiar, of course.)

Of course.  And with his surrenderist foreign policy, The One thinks he's making sure that no incovenient global war can get in the way of his finishing the job that FDR left unfinished.  And via his Department of Injustice & Revenge's voter intimidation and election theft projects, and amnestizing twelve (or more) million new Democrat voters, permanent, dictatorial one-party Donk rule forever, and his presidency-for-life, will be guaranteed.

That's the master plan, anyway.

That's why, as important as the November midterm elections are, taking back Congress will, in the big picture, only be a breather, like snagging a branch on the side of the cliff down which you're plunging to your doom.  2012 is the big one, the point of no return.  Reversing and repairing the massive damage of Obamunism can't really begin in earnest until both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue are back in GOP hands.

Which is why the first order of business for the Boehner/McConnell Congress must be to retroactively extend the Bush tax cuts, and make Barack Obama veto it.  And then repeal and replace ObamaCare, and make Barack Obama veto that.  And defund what's left of Hogzilla and make Barack Obama veto THAT.  Make him play defense and bury himself deeper with each act of defiant, unpopular obstructionism until he's such a pariah that maybe Peter Ferrara's prediction comes to fruition.

An opposition Congress is one thing FDR never had to contend with.  Bill Clinton did by (to the leftwingnut mind) selling out to them.  What will Red Barry do when the plan goes awry and he has to improvise?

He can start by stapling Tiny Tim's lips shut.