Authors: Obama ‘Trying to Emulate’ Roosevelt

Me: You sure about that?

“Obama’s trying to emulate Roosevelt,” Burton Folsom Jr., a history
professor at Hillsdale College in Michigan, tells Newsmax. “Obama likes
Roosevelt. He often talks about these programs that he’s instituting
being the greatest number of programs, sometimes he’ll say, in 70 years.
In other words, he’s making a reference to Roosevelt.”

Doesn't give you the maximum of objective news...


I try my very best not to comment too often on US politics and opinions, but sometimes I just can't hold back. The above quoted article is so full of generalizations and just plain wrong conclusions I had to say something. Yes, it's Newsmax, I know. Even as a foreigner I realize criticizing a Newsmax article is like beating a one-legged blind man in the 100 meter race, but come on!

“He thinks highly of Roosevelt and the New Deal,” Burton Folsom tells
Newsmax of President Obama. “He likes the idea of increased
intervention. And he very much thinks that the president ought to have
more power.


“Part of why we wrote “FDR Goes to War,” we thought there were lessons
and parallels to Roosevelt,” he adds. “We were speaking to Americans
today about a pattern of executives grabbing for power, how to stop it —
and the negative consequences of when it happens.”

Every executive ever has always grabbed for more power in one way or form. Even as someone who finds Obama way overrated and unfit for his job this isn't a really a valid criticism of only his or democrat-led administrations in general.

“Roosevelt was mainly concerned with being re-elected — and if he could
suspend civil liberties, if it would help him win re-election during
wartime, he seemed to have regrettably chosen that path.”

Didn't Lincoln also suspend civil liberties during wartime? Somehow I don't see Roosevelt being that much concerned with being re-elected. Considering he won the electoral vote in a landslide and had a nice margin in the popular vote I don't see how the imprisonment of a single newspaper owner would have made much of a difference.

“What we did in the United States that got us out of that Depression was
that we freed-up our economy,” Folsom adds. “The high tax rate, the 94
percent income tax rate on top incomes during the war, we sliced that.


“We cut the corporate income tax from 90 percent to 38 percent. We
freed-up the economy — and because of that, we had developments in
television, Xerox machines, and later McDonald’s and Holiday Inns, and
ballpoint pens.


“There were all sorts of investments, in addition to the iron and steel —
cars and the usual housing recovery — that got us out of the Great
Depression. We only had 3.9 percent unemployment in 1946 and 1947.


“We freed-up the economy,” Folsom says. “We cut the tax rates. We cut
federal spending by more than half — and that ended the Great
Depression.”

I... uh... no. Just no. Granted, you won't find me favoring 94% income tax rates or 90% corporate income taxes. But this here is basic bullshit logic. Cutting taxes and cutting federal spending didn't get you out of the Great Depression. Becoming the warehouse and manufacturing center for the rest of the war-ravaged world, however, did. For almost a decade you were the sole go-to address for everybody who wanted to buy, well, anything. And quite frankly, your great technological developments (and I'm not bad-mouthing American ingenuity, folks)? Maybe they had something to do with, say, the thousands of pre-war immigrated European scientists? The thousands of high-class scientists and engineers whisked away by Operation Paperclip and others like it? The 340,000 (!!!) German patents you appropriated? You know, either that or Tea Party Thomas Jefferson Boyaa! What sounds more reasonable?