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Friday, January 2, 2009
The line for handouts grows longer
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Ummmm, no. I don’t think so, no. But nice try.
from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
With the state and federal governments looking for ways to jump-start the economy, a New Jersey businessman has an ambitious public works project he says will create more than 5,500 jobs and provide $500 million or more to local contractors.
The businessman is Zygi Wilf, principal owner of the Minnesota Vikings.
The project: A $954 million, state-of-the-art stadium for his football team in downtown Minneapolis — to be constructed using more than $635 million in public money.
“Why not? The Vikings are a public asset,” said Lester Bagley, the Vikings’ vice president in charge of stadium development. “This is going to create an economic boost.”
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The ‘FDR made Depression worse’ fantasy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
One the more remarkable aspects of the modern conservative movement is its eagerness to believe whatever it prefers to believe, whatever gives conservatives ammunition against their opponents, regardless of the facts and data and expert opinion.
The latest example of such behavior is the claim that FDR’s New Deal extended and deepened the Great Depression, a newly formed myth that is without any basis in fact. Yet it is embraced by some on the right solely because it bolsters their argument against policies proposed by President-elect Barack Obama.
It’s telling that in its last days in power, the Bush administration isn’t having much truck with that notion, having proposed significant stimulus packages of its own and agreeing to bail out Detroit over protests from the hard right. Bush officials recognize that our economic situation is so grave as to preclude political point-scoring. But those without the burden of responsibility are free to, well, just make stuff up.
David Sirota, writing in Salon, has a nice piece debunking the FDR claim, not that it matters much. People willing to believe that the Clintons killed Vince Foster and there’s no such thing as global warming can talk themselves into believing almost anything. You can’t reason someone out of a position when reason had nothing whatsoever to do with putting there in the first place.
Writes Sirota:
“On deeper examination, I discovered that the right bases its New Deal revisionism on the short-lived recession in a year straddling 1937 and 1938. But that was four years into Roosevelt’s term — four years marked by spectacular economic growth. Additionally, the fleeting decline happened not because of the New Deal’s spending programs, but because Roosevelt momentarily listened to conservatives and backed off them. As Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman notes, in 1937-38, FDR “was persuaded to balance the budget” and “cut spending and the economy went back down again….”
“Excepting 1937-1938, unemployment fell each year of Roosevelt’s first two terms [while] the U.S. economy grew at average annual growth rates of 9 percent to 10 percent,” writes University of California historian Eric Rauchway…
OK — if the verifiable evidence proves the New Deal did not prolong the Depression, what about historians — do they “pretty much agree” on the opposite?
Again, no.
As Newsweek’s Daniel Gross reports, “One would be very hard-pressed to find a serious professional historian who believes that the New Deal prolonged the Depression.”
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