Posted by
Troy Camplin on Wednesday, February 18, 2009 9:29:38 AM
In the 70's, Nixon declared, "We are all Keynseans now." This year, Newsweek (http://www.newsweek.com/id/183663) pronounced, "We are all socialists now." How did we get here? A few quotes from the articles:
"The U.S. government has already—under a conservative Republican administration—effectively nationalized the banking and mortgage industries."
"it was, again, under a conservative GOP administration that we enacted the largest expansion of the welfare state in 30 years: prescription drugs for the elderly. People on the right and the left want government to invest in alternative energies in order to break our addiction to foreign oil. And it is unlikely that even the reddest of states will decline federal money for infrastructural improvements."
"A decade ago U.S. government spending was 34.3 percent of GDP, compared with 48.2 percent in the euro zone—a roughly 14-point gap, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In 2010 U.S. spending is expected to be 39.9 percent of GDP, compared with 47.1 percent in the euro zone—a gap of less than 8 points. As entitlement spending rises over the next decade, we will become even more French."
"the man who laid the foundations for the world Obama now rules is George W. Bush, who moved to bail out the financial sector last autumn with $700 billion."
And here is the problem in a nutshell. People believe that "The Obama administration is caught in a paradox. It must borrow and spend to fix a crisis created by too much borrowing and spending." But this is not a paradox. If you find that someone is dying of arsenic poisoning, you don't give them more arsenic. Only a socialist would think that more of what caused your economic problems is what you need to solve them.