Just like the Old New Deal where Roosevelt had NRA (National Recovery Act) parades through the streets of New York, Barack Obama is planning a massive PR blitz to convince Americans that his ginormous spending plan is absolutely crucial to our nation’s recovery.
Reporting from Washington — President-elect Barack Obama is preparing to lead a full-scale marketing blitz to pass the massive new stimulus package that he says is needed to revive the slumping economy and put the nation on the course he laid out during his campaign.
Obama will move to Washington this weekend, checking into a hotel with his family. In the remaining weeks of the transition, and after he is sworn in, he will use the bully pulpit to make the case for passage of a stimulus package of up to $775 billion, an aide said.
You can bank that thhe price tag isn’t as high now as it will be in the end. The original New Deal’s cost, adjusted for inflation, is estimated to be in the area of $500 billion. Result? The Great Depression extended by 7 years, according to UCLA economists. Obama’s got four, eight years max in the White House. Good luck with that.
“We’ll fan out, and this will be a public process,” Axelrod said in an interview. “We’ll make clear to people why we need to do what we’re doing, why it’s the size it is, what the individual component parts are, and why they are an important part of the equation in terms of short-term recovery.”
Basically he’ll try to fool the American people into thinking that the only way to solve this financial crisis is with massive government spending and intervention.
Even with Israel locked in an escalating battle with Hamas, Obama doesn’t want foreign policy considerations to intrude on an ambitious domestic agenda, advisors say.
“Not that anyone is unconcerned about the situation in the Middle East,” Axelrod said, “but when you’re struggling because you’ve lost your job or are concerned about losing your job, or you can’t get a loan for your business or send your kid to college, it’s pretty hard to look past that.”
As an individual, yes. But not as the Commander-in-Chief and leader of the free world. It seems sort of important that, while dealing with the economy, you pay attention to the situations unfolding in the Middle East and Asia. That might, I don’t know, have some sort of impact on us. Especially when the President-elect is promising a massive build-up of Armed Forces in Afghanistan and made that promise a central point in his campaign.
Where will Blue Dog Democrats come down on this? We constantly hear from them about the size of the deficit and they’re supposedly fiscally conservative/moderate. Will they simply go along with Obama’s massive expansion of said deficit, or will they also demand time to analyze the plan and make changes?
1. January 2009 at 9:28 am
Marxism, or collectivism, with central bureaucratic control of markets and economy, is the solution to all problems; this is the drumbeat of Obama.
Before July of last year, Obama was touting the virtues of mindless investment in useless infrastructure; this was prior to the surge in unemployment of last fall.
Obama made a particularly deluded campaign speech in West Virginia, during the 2008 Olympics, lauding the virtues of Red Chinese infrastructure, which he described as all “vastly superior to ours.” What an amazing arrogance!
Building infrastructure under government control was the solution then; with economic conditions vastly different today, it is still the solution. 4 years from today, it will still be the solution. More government control is the only solution; Obama is a one-trick poney.
Marxist concepts die hard indeed; but as you point out, never produce useful results.
We should be encouraging the start-up of innovative new business, which has been the backbone of American success, utterly and over history. Instead our capital will be dissipated into “infrastructure” managers like Tony Rezko, and ACORN.
So far, the “infrastructure” of Obama’s new deal is a laundry list, to be accelerated, of pork projects which have been accumulated on various dem politician’s desks up to now.
The only economic success Obama pursues is a new dictatorship of the proletariat (and a de-facto dictatorship of Obama). Economic success means nobody will have more wealth than the proletariat.