Theodore's World

“ We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work… And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong … somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises … I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started … And an enormous debt to boot ! ”

These words were spoken 72 years ago before the House Ways and Means Committee in May 1939 by Henry Morgenthau, Jr. — close friend, lunch companion, and loyal Secretary of the Treasury until 1945 to President Franklin D. Roosevelt — and key architect of FDR’s New Deal.

Morgenthau made this startling confession during the seventh year of the New Deal programs seeking to combat rampant unemployment during the Great Depression.

With these words, Morgenthau summarized the harsh suffering and protracted misery, the lost decade that was the 1930’s.

When he spoke in 1939, just before the start of World War II, unemployment was actually worse than before FDR was elected President in 1932.

Indeed, with those words, Morgenthau confessed what so many keepers of FDR’s New Deal flame still won’t admit today:

massive public sector spending on public works programs doesn’t erase historic unemployment. It doesn’t produce an economic recovery, it postpones one.

Nearly three generations of Americans later, we just went through another $800 billion “stimulus” last year, this President now proposes yet another $450 billion and there are still some Democrats wanting an even bolder economic stimulus that depends on even more hundreds of billions in new deficit federal government spending to create jobs.

This President's problem is not messaging, but gambling America’s future on an economic policy that is not only false but a proven failure now as in the 1930’s.

When he agreed to let Congress blow out the deficit through the $800 billion stimulus package, he bet his entire Presidency that Paul Krugman and the Democrats’ Keynesian obsession would be right.

John Maynard Keynes and Paul Krugman have been wrong all along because they think government can spend and spend and spend other people’s money to prosperity.

What needs most of all to be brought to the fore is the folly, the mendacity that public sector government spending can be equated to private sector spending.

Private capital and private resources applied with private risk taking within the private sector are altogether different from public sector government spending other people’s money acquired through taxes extracted from a productive private sector. Our prosperity comes from the private sector.

This is the real world of personal risk taking, privately applied capital and productive resources, the real world struggle of just making a living in the results oriented private sector that does not allow for waste, inefficiencies, bloated bureaucracies, ineffective endeavors, deficit spending, insolvencies, and protracted development.

If the majority of our economy is consumer spending, I’d feel a lot better if those on unemployment compensation, social security, and the now more than 46 million Americans on the SNAP food stamp program were all spending their own money.

But they are not. Consequently we cannot equate this spending with those consumers spending their own hard earned money that comes as a result of productive activity.

Yet in this modern government accounting, it’s all counted the same within the nation’s GDP.

I contend this to be a false and detrimental economic evaluation, a perversion of economic reality, and a highly misleading statement of our well being.

It is a road to ruin led by central planners within an unlimited highly intrusive federal government that all ends up in a huge betrayal to the citizens they’re supposed to protect with the wells of Congress and the wells of municipal public chambers across this country filled with unpaid bills.

Most sixth graders could understand these words I write. How is it that all these Ivy Leaguers that continue to govern us can’t ?

History will well record that Bill Clinton, the last Democrat in the White House, was impeached by the House and although a majority of 55 Senators voted to convict, a minority of 45 Senators gained his acquittal, a two thirds majority being necessary to remove him from office.

Consequently, this President cannot win reelection next year. He will be defeated simply because he must be defeated.

That's what I love about Herman Cain; simple and to the point. His six words summed up the whole speech.

Well said, Carlos.

Herman Cain is right on the money too.

This speech was nothing more than political posturing on Obama's part. It was designed to, once again, make the opponents to his way of thinking, appear to be the bad guys who are preventing real reforms from taking place.

Such thinking will work as long as the media buys in and plays along.

We can only hope that the citizens of this, Once Great Nation, see this for what it is and act accordingly.

In order for Congress to best suppport the man who calls for the "end to this political circus",they need to start at the top with the ring master.

I think that obama has lost it mentally. His handlers and the media have shielded him from reality. He had too easy a road to the presidency. obama probably now believes his own speeches. Besides, his mind is probably focused mainly on planning for his next sixteen vacations.

If the Repubs don't screw up they should be able to beat obama next year.

Carlos, that was great thank you. I never knew about that and what was said.

Bob, yes Cain gave a wonderful response.

Sean, your so right, I agree and thank you Sean.

Tom, I want that so much. We have got to get him out of there.
I agree too Tom, Obama is a very unstable person, his campaign before fed him, fed his ego and he still thinks he is the Mesiah.