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August 27, 2009

Repeal Obama's Raw Deal. Now.

By William Tate
Back in 2003, when a Barack Obama presidency was little more than a gleam in George Soros's eye, Jim Powell published a book which was disturbingly prescient. Titled FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression, it outlined how Franklin Roosevelt's big spending policies hindered, rather than helped, the United States in recovering from the Great Depression.

Obama apparently was too busy in 2003 -- maybe listening to his spiritual advisor Jeremiah Wright ranting "God damn America," or helping his good friend and mentor Tony Rezko raise money for Obama's U.S. Senate campaign, or voting 'present' in the Illinois state senate -- to read Powell's book, because he has embarked on a path to replicate FDR's failures.

Obama's reckless spending has already sent the federal deficit mushrooming, like some economic radioactive cloud, in just his first year, and evidence mounts that Obama's economic policies are nothing more than a Raw Deal.

Last spring, Obama tried to jawbone international leaders into imposing the same sort of porkulus package that Democrats strong-armed through Congress here. They, for the most part, rejected Obama's exhortations.

Now, much of the world is already coming out of the global recession, Germany and France -- the leaders of both countries publicly rebuked Obama's calls for more stimulus spending -- have already exited the recession, while the Obama administration is revising downward their already gloomy economic projections.

The O Team's response to the disheartening news was as predictable--'the economy we inherited was worse than we thought' -- as it was false. After all, the very first statement in the very first press briefing by Robert Gibbs was the announcement that Obama would be receiving detailed daily briefings on the economic situation.

"Mr. Gibbs said that this briefing will be treated with the same 'professionalism' as the daily intelligence briefing. These meetings will be led by (National Economic Council Director) Larry Summers."

These briefings, then, would have presented Barack Obama with precise, detailed information on the U.S. economy every day for over seven months now. Either Obama hasn't been paying attention, or his economic advisors are incompetent.

The Obamatons' other excuse for their out of control budget deficit is even more convoluted, with White House budget director Peter Orszag saying federal health spending is "the key driver of our long-term deficits," mainly on ballooning Medicare and Medicaid costs.

This as they prepare to weigh down the federal budget with exponentially more health care costs through ObamaCare.

And aren't the emperor's new clothes magnificent?

In FDR's Folly, Powell points out that many, if not most, of Roosevelt's economic and social policies did little to solve the specific problems at which they were supposedly aimed. They were often politically oriented, aimed, primarily, at getting Roosevelt and other Democrats elected.

What was that Yogi Berra said about déjà vu?

Powell wrote  at the time of his book's publication,

"In addition to FDR's Folly, the only major work mentioning evidence about the economic consequences of the New Deal is by Stanford University political historian David M. Kennedy: his 1999 book Freedom from Fear won the Pulitzer Prize.  'Whatever it was,' he (Kennedy) wrote, the New Deal 'was not a recovery program.' "

Likewise, whatever it is, Obama's Raw Deal is not a recovery program.

Economist Casey B. Mulligan, writing in the Economix blog at the New York Times, notes:

"The Obama administration had said that the stimulus bill would 'save or create' 3.5 million jobs while adding $787 billion to the federal budget. Admittedly, some of this money went to taxpayers and to some worthwhile public works, but it also created additional economic burdens in the process of collecting the taxes and issuing the debt to pay for it. To an order of magnitude, the promise of those 3.5 million jobs cost a quarter of a million dollars per job promised."

Evidence is mounting that Raw Deal money is being spent recklessly. Thousands of prison inmates have received stimulus checks totaling into the millions. And, according to a review of Raw Deal projects by Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn,

"Millions of dollars are going toward bicycle lockers, bike paths, walking trails and a skate park, Coburn said. One town in North Carolina is using stimulus funds to hire an administrator whose job will be to procure more stimulus funds, according to the report."

Unlike the New Deal, we can still do something about the Raw Deal. Much of the package remains in the pipeline, pork waiting to be lavished on recipients of Obama's choosing.

Mulligan's NYT column, believe it or not, is entitled "Forget a 'Second' Stimulus. Stop the First One!"

He couldn't have said it better.

Congress should make this one of the first orders of business after their August recess.

Take a Mulligan, repeal Obama's Raw Deal.

Now.

William Tate is an award-winning journalist and author
on "Repeal Obama's Raw Deal. Now."