Is BHO the new FDR?

"No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth! - Ronald Reagan"


I’ve noticed that the clutter of my room and the size of government have something in common. Neither is ever significantly reduced. The growth of the clutter is sometimes slowed, but there is never any sizable reduction in clutter.

Ronald Reagan was deep admirer of Franklin Roosevelt. Reagan’s Democratic father, Jack, was employed under the New Deal during the Great Depression.

The former president mentions much of this in his memoir, An American Life. Reagan writes that Franklin Roosevelt, Jr. often said that President Roosevelt’s

welfare and relief programs… were meant only as emergency, stopgag measures to cope with a crisis, not the seeds of what others later tried to turn into a permanent welfare state.

President Reagan also goes on to say that

as smart as he was, though, I suspect even FDR didn’t realize that once you created a bureaucracy, it took on a life of its own. It was almost impossible to close down a bureaucracy once it had been created.

Remember though, that FDR had run for president on the promise of “change”. Roosevelt desired (or so he said) to return powers to the states that the federal government had wrongfully seized. He also called for a one-fourth reduction of the federal budget.

The then-Governor Roosevelt attacked the Hoover Administration during the election of 1932 as “the most reckless and extravagant past that I have been able to discover in the statistical record of any peacetime government, any time.”
FDR was absolutely right. But then what happened?

Likewise, during the campaign, I seem to remember then-Senator Barack Obama called for transparency and accountability. We heard “change” over and over again. Is President Obama the new FDR? This is just one of the many similarities I see between 2008/09 and 1932/33.

If President Obama is the new FDR, we can expect an extended, nasty depression spanning a decade or more.



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