It’s the Obama version of “Happy Days”! (Only without the Fonz. Because the Fonz was cool. And “cool” is racist code. For “bumbling economic illiterate marinated in Marxism and radical chic,” or some such.)
Get ready for some Baby Boomer nostalgia from our 21st century, ultramodern president: “In the decades after World War II there was a general consensus that the market couldn’t solve all of our problems on its own. …This consensus, this shared vision led to the strongest economic growth and the largest middle class that the world has ever known. It led to a shared prosperity. “
The 1950s and 1960s — taxes were high, unions were strong, incomes more equal. And the U.S. economy grew by 3.7% a year. So, Obama seems to suggest, let’s just dial up the economic Way Back Machine — raise taxes on the rich, reregulate industry, boost union power – and we can go back to the future.
In a recent piece on the presidential campaign in New York magazine, an Obama aide described Mitt Romney this way: “He’s the fifties, he is retro, he is backward, and we are forward.” Yet Obama is the one touting his economic vision as a bridge to the 1950s.
But there’s no going back, Mr. President. The post-World War II decades were affected by a host of unique factors, not the least of which was that they came right after a devastating global war that left America’s competitors in ruins. A National Bureau of Economic Research study described the situation this way: “At the end of World War II, the United States was the dominant industrial producer in the world. … This was obviously a transitory situation.”
And as former Bain Capital executive Edward Conard notes in his new book, Unintended Consequences, the size of the U.S. labor force was constrained during those decades by both the 1930s baby bust and casualties from the war. So a surge in jobs and a restricted supply of labor produced fat wage growth. Hoping for a return to that era is futile, Conard concludes:
The United States was prosperous for a unique set of reasons that are impossible to duplicate today, including a decade-long depression, the destruction of the rest of the world’s infrastructure, a failure of potential foreign competitors to educate their people, and a highly restricted supply of labor. For the sake of mankind, let’s hope those conditions aren’t repeated. It seems to me anyone who makes comparisons between todays’ economy and that of the 1950s and 1960s without fully disclosing their differences is deceiving their readers.
Demographics, technology and globalization — has Obama noticed how any of these have changed over the past half century? It was hard to tell from that Ohio speech. Instead of modernizing the American social insurance system, regulatory regime and tax code to shift the Welfare State into an Innovation State, the president seems to be doubling down on an obsolete economic model where growth is driven by expanding public sector union employment and a clean-energy version of industrial policy.
Looking backward — and drawing the wrong conclusions — is no way to move forward.
Well, Jim, that depends. How committed is one to Cloward-Piven? Or Alinsky?
IYKWIMAITYD.
I think we can all acknowledge that those dastardly, job-stealing ATMs didn’t yet exist back then. That’s small potatoes though. Think of all the jobs that will open up once we take women out of the work force!
Back to the future!
I’ve always kind of wanted a fifties-style coonskin hat. So there’s that.
It’s strange how a generalized, widespread frenzied madness practically forces (here and there) a quiet contemplation leading to a way out, innit?
That’s racist. Like, Cooley High-level racist.
bringing back the whole victory garden thing is all his bitch do with her day
And that was why Democrat John Kennedy had to cut taxes to head off a recession that was setting in by the late ’50s/early ’60s.
Michael Barone, had some relevant thoughts in his review of this book by Morton Keller:
Bold emphases added.
Oh yeah. Obama’s not a 50s throwback. At best, he’s a 30’s throwback.
But then the entire Democrat party’s been almost entirely reactionary since at least 1980, and maybe since 1968.
I got a comment with too many links in it stuck in moderation.
Give me a second.
I’m still believing we, America’s U.S.A., peaked as a nation in the summer of ’69 when we put a man onna moon. Since, sure, we’ve technologically progressed and incredibly so, but morally and spiritually we’ve done naught but decay. Eventually, when this thin veneer of civilization is stripped away by some inexorable force (massive, uncontrollable economic collapse or something else, random or planned) we will have a Come to [fill in the convenient, unfortunately blank] moment.
Or not. We can always hope that some guidance from *whatever* or last-minute sensibilities stirring within our populace works in our favor.
Okay, it’s there now.
I always enjoy the longing for the economic high times of the 1950s. To get it back again all we have to do is raise taxes, equalize incomes, stengthen unions, kill 60,000,000 people and destroy the rest of the world’s industrial capacity.
Funny how they always leave out the last couple of requirements.
what these obamatarded economy-raping fuckholes what see everything through a snotty ironic Jon Stewart-slash-things-white-people-like lens don’t seem to get is that Don Draper is really a pretty fucking cool guy
people empathize with him; he’s iconic
whereas Obama is just a cheesy choom gang loser what sucks Hollywood cock for a dollar.
Ernst, isn’t Obama a throw-back to Wilson’s policies? He certainly has the same temperament as Wilson and the same delusions of grandeur.
I’m kind of hoping he has a Wilson like health episode. Like now.
This motherfucking dictator actually is willing to declaim “I didn’t ask for an argument.” Interesting. If not, then he’ll likely understand where that lead is hailing from.
Judging from the way he’s been acting lately, are we sure he hasn’t already had one?
Incapacitating stroke? I think we’d be able to tell.
It’s time for a Velvet Revolution.
Really? So long as the connection between the visual center and the vocal center is intact, who will be able to tell? He’ll still be able to read off the teleprompter, even if he’s filling up a Depends every hour.
Wilson was bed-ridden and Mrs. Wilson was the de facto president for the last year or so of his presidency, if I recall correctly.
I don’t know if it’s true or not (and not my area of expertise) but I have read that he has Parkinson’s, Rob. Of course, I read that on hillbuzz before I quit reading it a year or so ago. So consider the source and all.
Wilson was also 62 when he had his incapacitating stroke, immediately after a bout of influenza that may not have been much different from the strain that was behind the deadly pandemic about that time.
If Obama had exactly the same stroke Wilson had, he might actually not exhibit anywhere near the same degree of incapacity that Wilson did — but if he had one in a more critical part of the brain, dealing with cognition…
Ok then. It would be hard to tell, then wouldn’t it?
I said “at best.”
More to the point, since FDR was a Wilson retread, it amounts to the same thing.
Thanks.
O! wants to go back to the 50s as a cure for equalized employment?
Oky doky … start sending married women back home …
http://www.pbs.org/fmc/book/2work8.htm
Darleen,
That’s a triple win for this administration what with all those lost jobs which also means less gas guzzlers on the road and more young folks on the dole.