Clinton is an interesting guy, remarkably intelligent with abundant social skills. If only he had listened to economists like James Galbraith in 1993, he could have changed history so much for the better.

But he is a centrist: let Wall Street run America and everything will trickle down. So there went Glass-Steagall and everything else.

Obama was almost as bad. His first run for President in the primary and in the general election was financed by .... Wall Street. Then he let Geitner have his way: bailing out Wall Street and forgetting Main Street.

But the lesser of two evils.....

If you mean his bailing out GM, what do you think would have happened to the country had he not bailed them out?
I don't know what would have happened but Obama was between a rock and a hard place. God only knows how many jobs would have evaporated had he not bailed GM out. In doing so he introduced another facet of socialism to our "capitalistic" country. We're not the democracy we thought we were. SS started it and the GM bail out confirmed it all the more to for the US to be a quasi-capitalistic democracy. Now with AHC we're moving more toward Socialism.
My question is....is it so bad? Pure democracy works if everybody pulls their weight. That doesn't happen so maybe it's "wake up time"
to accept the fact that a pure democracy is a great idea but not at all feasible. I think of it as "tweaking" our form of govt...like a tune-up.

I remember an interview with a car dealer about the time of the big auto bailouts. In one sentence he explained the main problem with Detroit. "The can't put as much into their cars." He was talking about why the Japanese competition was taking market share from Detroit. Japan builds cars in the US now, but in non union plants in right to work states. They are not weighed down with high salaries, legacy pensions, and union rules, so for a given price they can put more into the actual car.
Toyota is now the world's largest car producer, dethroning GM.

Extending the dealer's statement just a little and you can see the essential problem with Socialism. To much capital is wasted with top heavy distant adminstration, leaving less for the services rendered. Local control is more efficient, much closer to the problem, intimate knowledge of the problem, and delivers more and better service for the capital spent.

I don't know if I'd put too much stock in what a car dealer says. What I do know is from history of Asian cars starting in the early 70's.
Like most Japanese products in those days they were considered a joke. After the first gas embargo in 73' the joke was lessening and Americans began buying compact cars to save $$$. Detroit was losing sales and Toyota and Datsun were gaining in sales and Detroit sat on their butt waiting for the novelty to wear off.....it didn't. It grew in leaps and bounds and Detroit never made a vehicle good enough to compete with them. Who would have thought Toyota would overtake GM? I guess is GM wanted to change their operation and listen to what the American people wanted they would be a good adversary.
They were too arrogant and lacked the insight to thwart the competition. I've owned American and metric cars. I swore off American cars in 1983 and now own two Toyotas and have never been happier with the Prius and Rav4. I know American car makers can make a much better car than they do but they don't. Just look at the GM ignition key fiasco! All they had to do was to rotate the switch
+90 degrees so that the on position of the switch was at the 6 o-clock position and the damned ignition switch wouldn't shut off because of gravity!

If you mean his bailing out GM, what do you think would have happened to the country had he not bailed them out?
I don't know what would have happened but Obama was between a rock and a hard place. God only knows how many jobs would have evaporated had he not bailed GM out. In doing so he introduced another facet of socialism to our "capitalistic" country. We're not the democracy we thought we were. SS started it and the GM bail out confirmed it all the more to for the US to be a quasi-capitalistic democracy. Now with AHC we're moving more toward Socialism.
My question is....is it so bad? Pure democracy works if everybody pulls their weight. That doesn't happen so maybe it's "wake up time"
to accept the fact that a pure democracy is a great idea but not at all feasible. I think of it as "tweaking" our form of govt...like a tune-up.

I remember an interview with a car dealer about the time of the big auto bailouts. In one sentence he explained the main problem with Detroit. "The can't put as much into their cars." He was talking about why the Japanese competition was taking market share from Detroit. Japan builds cars in the US now, but in non union plants in right to work states. They are not weighed down with high salaries, legacy pensions, and union rules, so for a given price they can put more into the actual car.
Toyota is now the world's largest car producer, dethroning GM.

Extending the dealer's statement just a little and you can see the essential problem with Socialism. To much capital is wasted with top heavy distant adminstration, leaving less for the services rendered. Local control is more efficient, much closer to the problem, intimate knowledge of the problem, and delivers more and better service for the capital spent.

Ken Burns’ docudrama on the Roosevelts—for those who weren’t bored to tears—repeats nearly all the worn-out fairy tales of the FDR presidency, including what I call the most enduring myth of the 20th century, which is that FDR’s avalanche of alphabet-soup government programs ended the Great Depression. Shouldn’t there be a statute of limitations on such lies?

Ask nearly anyone over the age of 80, and they will say that FDR cared about the working man and “gave the country hope,” a point that Mr. Burns emphasizes. Roosevelt exuded empathy, which isn’t a bad thing—remember Bill Clinton’s memorable line “I feel your pain”?—but caring doesn’t create jobs or lift gross domestic product.

Nor does spending government money revive growth, despite the theories put into practice by the then-dean of all economists, John Maynard Keynes. Any objective analysis of these facts can lead to no other conclusion. U.S. unemployment averaged a rate of 18 percent during Roosevelt’s first eight years in office. In the decade of the 1930s, U.S. industrial production and national income fell by about almost one-third. In 1940, after year eight years of the New Deal, unemployment was still averaged a god-awful 14 percent.

Think of it this way. The unemployment rate was more than twice as high eight years into the New Deal than it is today, and American workers now are angry as hornets. Imagine, if jobs were twice as scarce today, the pitchforked revolt that would be going on. This is success?

Almost everything FDR did to jump-start growth retarded it. The rise in the minimum wage kept unemployment intolerably high. (Are you listening, Nancy Pelosi?) Roosevelt’s work programs like the Works Progress Administration, National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration were so bureaucratic as to have minimal impact on jobs. Raising tax rates to nearly 80 percent on the rich stalled the economy. Social Security is and always was from the start a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme that will eventually sink into bankruptcy unless reformed.

The most alarming story of economic ignorance surrounding this New Deal era was the tax increases while the economy was faltering. According to economist Burt Folsom, FDR signed one of the most financially devastating taxes: “On April 27, 1942, he signed an executive order taxing all personal income above $25,000 (rich back then) at 100 percent. Congress balked at that idea and later lowered it to 90 percent at the top level.” The New Dealers completely ignored the lessons of the 1920s tax cuts, which just a decade before had unfurled an age of super-growth.

Then there was the spending and debt barrage. Federal spending catapulted from $4.65 billion in 1933 to nearly $13.7 billion in 1941. This tripling of the federal budget in just eight years came at a time of almost no inflation (just 13.1 percent cumulative during that period). Budget surpluses during the prosperous Coolidge years became ever-larger deficits under FDR’s fiscal reign. During his first term, more than half the federal budget on average came from borrowed money.

The cruel irony of the New Deal is that the liberals’ honorable intentions to help the poor and the unemployed caused more human suffering than any other set of ideas in the past century.

What is maddening is that thanks to this historical fabrication of FDR’s presidency, dutifully repeated by Mr. Burns, we have repeated the mistakes again and again. Had the history books been properly written, it’s quite possible we would never had to endure the catastrophic failure of Obamanomics and the “stimulus plans” that only stimulated debt. The entire rationale for the Obama economic plan in 2009 was to re-create new New Deal.

Doubly amazing is that at this very moment, the left is writing another fabricated history — of the years we have just lived through. The history books are already painting Obama policies as the just-in-time emergency policies that prevented a Second Great Depression. I wonder if 80 years from now, the American people will be as gullible as they are today in believing, FDR was an economic savior.

Stephen Moore, Heritage Foundation

Good points though I do not understand why our economy is improveing if it is not because of bailing out the auto industry banking industry etc, One FDR legacy I would like to see ended is the practice of paying farmers to let fields go fallow Rather than growing food. This is supposed to be for price controls. seems to me our grocerys would be cheaper if this practice stopped and Farmers had to plant these fields for income instead of the government giving them the income for not planting. If supply goes up prices should go down.