Doubling Down For Disaster with Stimulus II

The US Congress, along with President, Barak Obama, and their counterparts in the Federal Reserve are doubling down in their gamble on government spending. 

Despite the quantitative failed results of trying to stimulate job recovery through government spending and expansive monetary policies by central banks our government is insisting that we take the same old tried and failed....

measures of the past.  The theory is that the reason such measures failed in the past is that they did not go far enough.  That is, some liberal economists believe that FDR, LBJ, Jimmy Carter, and now Barak Obama in Stimulus I did not spend enough and government expansion into the private sector was too limited to be effective enough.

This theory fails to explain or demonstrate why "all in" measures used by other governments were such spectacular failures.  Here is the US history....

1. In 1923-24 following the disasterous policies of Warren Harding and the "Teapot Dome" scandal , the US economy was in the midst of a tailspin under Calvin Coolidge.  Herbert Hoover, the then Secretary of Commerce recommended drastic increases in spending and a new wave of import duty taxes to bolster the US economy.  Coolidge rejected these proposals and instead cut income taxes and raised the minimum levels at which incomes were taxed so that only the very rich upper 2% of earners in the US paid any income tax.  The result was the economic growth period known as the "Roaring 20's".
2. In 1929 as newly elected President Herbert Hoover began the programs rejected by the previous President, the Great Depression began with the Stock Market collapse. Hoover's response was to double Federal spending. Hoover's budget was larger than all of the previous federal budgets added together. The result was a bank panic and eventual collapse of the entire banking system. Unemployment skyrocketed to 14% under Hoover's spending policies.
3. In 1933, after attacking Hoover's disasterous spending policies in his election campaign, newly elected President Franklin Roosevelt, and his majority in Congress, doubled down on Hoover's spending policies.  FDR continued Hoover's tax policies and even increased the top tax rate to 95% on income earners making over $100,000.00 per year.  The results were disasterous.  Economic activity by the private sectors cascaded and employment contracted to the point where 1 out of every 4 workers [25% of the workforce] were no longer employed. 
4. LBJ's war on poverty was a disasterous failure and resulted in the first near collapse of the social security system, riots in the streets [including race riots between  factions of poor rural and urban white and black Americans], and the doubling of the debts incurred during WW II.
5. Jimmy Carter's attempts at extending the failed social programs of the LBJ administration resulted in another doubling of the debt, double digit unemployment and interest rates that got as high as 20% on mortgage loans.
6. George HW Bush increased spending and taxes and the economy tanked along with Bush's incredibly high approval ratings from an unprecedented 92% in 1990 to an election defeat in 1992.
7. William Clinton presided over an economic recovery that began in 1995 and lasted through to 2007.  This recovery featured tax relief and spending cuts and a retraction of the welfare state which required beneficiaries to eventually become employed and productive workers. Under the Clinton policies debt was contained for the first time in many decades.
8. George W. Bush reversed a downturn in 2001 complicated by the 911 attacks with tax cuts.  But Bush failed to contain the growth of government and in 2007 the growth of government became unsustainable.  The result was a new banking collapse following a new round of debt growth and a weakening dollar due to Federal Reserve mismanagement. 
9. The decades long Fed easy money policy and low interest rates were an attempt at regaining wealth by taking value from holders of long term debt such as the Governments of China, oil producing OPEC countries, central banks worldwide, and our EU trading partners.  Basically the Fed stole everyone's wealth worldwide by doubling the money supply to finance government spending.
10. President George Bush proved he was incapable of managing the economy in the last acts of his waning administration by allowing Commerce Secretary Henry Paulson to scare the government into giving him a 750 Billion Dollar slush fund.  Unemployment went from 4% to 7% as Federal spending and borrowing reached an all time high.
11. In January of 2009, within days of President Obama's taking office, the Federal Government doubled spending and the national debt as an emergency measure to keep unemployment from reaching 8%.

Unfortunately the unemployemnt rate responded to the combined measures of George Bush and Barak Obama by going from 4% to 10% within 24 months of the explosive Federal spending.  Socialist Economists such as Harvard's Frank Reich, claim that this is because the measures were not enough and should have been twice as much. 

Unfortunately, Mr. Reich, the one time Carter and Clinton economic advisor and political candidate for office, can offer no examples where his widely touted socialist theory has ever worked.  Instead, the US Secretary of Commerce has been warned by former Soviet officials, Chinese Government officials, Latin American economic officials, among many others that our present course has never ever worked.

Former Russian President Vladimir Putin finds it particularly ironic that while the new Russia has unleashed their sleeping ability to create wealth by copying the former economic policies of the US economy, the US is falling into ruin following the economic policies of the former Soviet Union. 

It does not get any more ironic than that.