"Many New Deal works programs emphasized jobs over productivity. This drove some of his credentialed staff crazy. Once Rexford Tugwell, one of his closest advisers, even ribbed the president about a construction project where men used shovels, instead of tractors. If the purpose was jobs, why not use spoons?"
Obama Is a Loser Who Wins, Like FDR in 1936 - Bloomberg
By - Mar 28, 2012
The loser wins. That’s the way it can go in presidential elections. Especially when the ballot involves a likable incumbent who happens to be failing when it comes to his task of helping the U.S. economy.
In the case of President Barack Obama’s campaign for re- election, the loser the president most resembles is the one he evokes with his radio addresses: the great radio president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt came into office in 1933 on a ticket of recovery. Neither employment nor the stock market returned to pre-crash levels by 1936. Yet Roosevelt won that year, taking all but two of 48 states.
A side-by-side comparison of presidential records and the campaigns of 1936 and 2012 suggests how Obama might fare, too -- minus the landslide part. The resemblance starts, of course, with the poor quality of the underlying economy in those first four years.
The U.S. grew from 1933 to 1936, but neither the stock market nor the unemployment levels got back to where they had been at the market crash in 1929. Today, our data also sketch recovery, but neither the Dow Jones Industrial Average (INDU) nor employment is back to pre-crash levels.
The second feature Obama and Roosevelt share is bad policy.
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