Quote:
Originally Posted by peter12
Well, you used several convenient strawmen to bolster your position.
There is significant economic/historical evidence that the New Deal and Second World War only prolonged a financial bubble from the 1920s and instilled false consumer confidence until the 1970s when it all broke to pieces.
Keynesian theory is a somewhat effective criticism of neo-classical economics (which is probably the majority of opinion among actual economists) until you get to the actual long-term outcome of financial stimulus packages on consumer confidence and recovery of activity.
It doesn't matter what John McCain or Rush Limbaugh think, the Keynesians are just as, if not more, politically motivated to increase public sector spending.
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50 years is a very long bubble. One almost wonders if the term "bubble" is applicable when a "Bubble" is decades longer than the downturn that follows it.
In any case, that's not the right's argument--their argument is far more nonsensical. In essence, it's that World War II, not the New Deal, ended the recession.
That's not a straw man--that's the real alternative to Obama in the last election. A Republican party so unable to adapt to the changing realities that they're willing to revise history in order to claim that their obviously failed policies are still right. Every historian worth their salt knows that the New Deal has a massively stimulative effect up until the second Roosevelt recession--which was shallower than the Hoover recession, and had complex causes of its own. Prior to that, Roosevelt's policies cut unemployment from 20% to under 10%.
Claiming that WWII was the real reason actually isn't an argument at all--it's pointint to an even bigger government spending program as having lifted the U.S. out of recession for good, pushing unemployment down under two percent.
All of which is not really relevant anyway, because Obama is very different from Roosevelt. It doesn't sound like you and I disagree much about him, except that I see him as the clear lesser of two evils, and even his half-measures are surely better than the nothing-at-all offered by his opponent. But he's more like Clinton than Roosevelt--a centrist, a pragmatist--certainly not the leftist ideologue that he's made out to be.