We (Americans) voted for Herbert Hoover ("A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage"), and got the Great Depression. This set a precedent for presidents in my lifetime. In the 1950s we voted for General Eisenhower and got an end to the Korean War (that was a good thing, so I'm not complaining). Then, we voted for Democratic liberal JFK and got the beginnings of the War in Vietnam. We voted for Democrat LBJ over conservative Republican, Barry Goldwater. LBJ cast Goldwater as a trigger-happy warrior who was mean to poor people. Under LBJ, we got a massive escalation of the War in Vietnam, riots in the streets by people who LBJ was working to help, and a slew of anti-poverty programs which expanded welfare in ways that rewarded elements of underclass culture that unwittingly promoted the poverty culture so that it spread and was passed to succeeding generations. Then, we voted for Richard Nixon, who had a "plan" for ending the War in Vietnam, which resulted in even more American casualties than under LBJ, and ended in defeat and withdrawal. Unlike Goldwater, who was a true conservative, Nixon delivered the kinds of policies that would be expected of Democratic liberals: wage and price controls, diplomatic relations with China, and creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Then, we elected Ford and Carter, who performed as expected, more or less. Then we elected "conservative" Republican Ronald Reagan, who greatly expanded the federal government and borrowed huge amounts of money as he greatly increased the budget deficit and ran up the national debt. Then, Republican President George H.W. Bush took over and made sigificant cuts in military spending. We then elected Democrat Bill Clinton, who appeared to be a liberal, but who turned the big budget deficit into a surplus and ended welfare as a lifetime entitlement for people who are able to work. Finally, we elected George Bush, conservative Republican, who set up a prescription drug program for seniors, virtually nationalized the banks and widened the budget deficit even more severely than the former poster boy for fiscal irresponsibility: Ronald Reagan.
As our nation welcomes to the presidency Barack Obama, I can't help but wonder if he will morph into the second coming of Attila the Hun. He is already off to a promising start. While liberal Democrat Barney Frank tried heroically but unsuccessfully to insert limits on executive pay into the original Paulson-Bush TARP legislation, President Obama's Treasury Department acted to prevent such provisions from being added to his stimulus package. Then, in a salute to Bush's best efforts to provide corporate welfare to the largest banks, Treasurer Geithner proposed to establish the Public-Private Partnership Investment Program (appropriately named because it is a real pip !), which will enable hedge funds and other investors to borrow vast sums from the government to buy toxic assets from troubled banks, with the taxpayers taking on most of the risk and the private investors reaping much of the profits. This plan is similar in purpose to the original Paulson-Bush TARP plan, which was never implemented in the way that it was sold to Congress. I had assumed that Paulson dropped the original TARP idea because it was too big a giveaway to the banks and they were afraid that it would be revealed as the biggest boondoggle in American history. But politicians evidently just don't think that way. The Obama-Geithner TARP revival plan makes Bush and Paulson look like pikers. First, they have raised the stakes tremendously by envisioning it as a $ trilion program. Second, they have have added a new profit-making opportunity for hedge funds and other investors to make a killing, with limited risk, by providing them with nonrecourse loans, where only their relatively small down payment will be at risk. Clearly this is far superior to the original TARP in the rewards it will provide to banks, hedge funds and the sovereign wealth funds of other nations. Paulson-Bush would never have had the chutzpah to propose a corporate welfare plan of this magnitude.
