Hoover to Bush - Deja Vu Junior

[rayboyusmc]

As he prepares to move back to Texas, our 43rd president is the beneficiary of Bush fatigue. The nation has long since repudiated him. Americans are looking ahead to the promise of Barack Obama.

And it's lucky for George W. Bush that they are, because his handling of our plunging economy is Hooverian in both its substance and inadequacy.

Herbert Hoover, we should recall, had a program for dealing with the Depression. It consisted of lending to banks but opposing fiscal stimulus or direct aid to individuals. Which is why Hank Paulson's frenzied endeavors to prop up the banking sector and Bush's dogged resistance to assisting anybody else amount to pure neo-Hooverism.

As the 1930s began, Hoover believed that the coordinated actions of the private sector could save the beleaguered economy. It soon became apparent that the only action that private-sector businesses could agree upon was closing down factories and offices and throwing people out of work. Under immense pressure to do something, in late 1931 Hoover asked Congress to establish the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, to provide funds to banks it deemed creditworthy.

By 1932, the RFC was making loans. Yet with the economy in free fall, the rate of bank failures increased until Hoover's successor, Franklin Roosevelt, created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.


Having done his bit to bail out the banks, however, Hoover rested. He opposed provisions that would have enabled homeowners to hang on to their homes.

....Sound familiar? The Bush administration's approach to today's meltdown is to direct all its energies and largess to lending institutions. There is, as yet, no program to help floundering homeowners renegotiate the terms of their mortgages. The president is opposed to further stimulus programs, even though private-sector investment in the United States has all but ceased.

..... Yet in the hearts of his countrymen, Bush's place is already fixed. Even before the financial collapse, he was in the ninth circle of presidential hell, with Buchanan and Hoover. At his own party's national convention this summer, his was the name that no one dared speak. And so, though his mishandling of the economy is criminally inept, he is being spared one more outbreak of public rage by two countervailing public sentiments: Americans' relief that he soon will be gone and their kind reluctance to kick a corpse.

Harold Meyerson - George W. Bush as Today's Herbert Hoover - washingtonpost.com

 

[Chris]

His limo should be pelted with garbage everytime he appears in public.

 

[CSM]

His limo should be pelted with garbage everytime he appears in public.

Ain't gonna happen...Hoover is dead.

 

[Mad Scientist]

Bush aint anywhere near Hoover. Hoover had a hands off policy in regards to the economy and recession at the time. He thought that businesses should pull themselves up by their bootstraps all by themselves.
Bush has been along wit the Dems, for the bailout and Federal Reserve action from the beginning. Please read up more on the Depression and leave your Bush bashing for another thread OK rayboy?

 

[del]

Ain't gonna happen...Hoover is dead.

still makes a helluva vacuum cleaner

 

[CSM]

still makes a helluva vacuum cleaner

Yep...and he owns a dam somewhere out west, too.

 

[Lycurgus]

So tell me the good word on Obama. How are things going? Any opinions on his movements thus far?