Biden's FDR Delusion

In early March, President Joe Biden met with a group of seven historians in the East Room of the White House. One topic of conversation: Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. "He'd like to be [FDR]," Axios' Mike Allen reported in an inside account of the meeting. "Biden's presidency has already been transformative, and he has many more giant plans teed up that could make Biden's New Deal the biggest change to governance in our lifetimes."

That's a bit over the top -- we don't know what is to come, but in its first 70 days Biden's presidency has not been transformative. But the "Biden's New Deal" talk is real. Axios reported there was much discussion of "transforming" the country, and much consideration of Biden's plan "to jam through once-in-a-lifetime historic changes to America."

Historian Michael Beschloss, who attended the meeting, reportedly said that FDR, along with Lyndon Johnson, are "the past century's closest analogues" to what Biden hopes to do. "Beschloss said the parallels include the New Deal economic relief that Franklin Roosevelt brought in 1933, which saved the country from the Depression and chaos," reported Axios.

To put it diplomatically, this is far-fetched. The United States is not in a Great Depression. Yes, there was an economic catastrophe last year. Everyone knows what caused it. GDP plunged, and unemployment soared. Then, quickly, GDP soared and unemployment plunged. The recovery began almost instantly. No, the economy is not yet fully recovered -- remember that at this point 12 months ago, the country was still headed into the worst days of the COVID pandemic -- but there is simply no comparison between the U.S. economy today and in 1933, when Roosevelt took office.

And for the economic problems that do persist, Congress has passed multi-trillion-dollar recovery bills. There is good reason to think that lawmakers have already spent too much money on recovery. Last month, before Congress passed a $1.9 trillion "COVID relief" recovery program, the Democratic economist Lawrence Summers argued the plan was too big for the problem it purported to fix.

Democrats went ahead and passed it anyway. Biden signed it into law. And now they want to pass $3 trillion, or maybe as much as $4 trillion, more in spending. Why? So that the president can "go big." So that he can "change the paradigm." (Biden said that not once, not twice, but three times during his first, and so far only, news conference.)

But what would the new spending do? If the $1.9 trillion "COVID relief" bill spends $150 billion a month to fix a $20-billion-a-month problem, what would a new plan do? "President Biden's economic advisers are pulling together a sweeping $3 trillion package to boost the economy, reduce carbon emissions and narrow economic inequality, beginning with a giant infrastructure plan," The New York Times reported recently. In The Washington Post, the headline was, "White House prepares massive infrastructure bill with universal pre-K, free community college, climate measures."

In other words, everything. What is really going on is that many Democrats are hoping to use Biden's presidency to "jam" into law a variety of Democratic agenda items old and new. Their vast ambitions are hampered by the fact that they have a very narrow majority in the House -- so narrow that Democrats are trying to grab a seat in Iowa that has already been certified by state election officials -- and the Senate is tied, 50-50. American voters have not given Democrats the kind of dominant majorities needed to "transform" the country.

In the first six years of FDR's presidency, Democrats had between 318 and 347 seats in the House. In the Senate, Democrats had between 60 and 79 seats, at a time when there were 96 senators. Neither party has ever again had 300 or more seats in the House, nor has either party ever had 70 or more seats in the Senate.

So Biden does not have the political strength to be Franklin Delano Roosevelt, even if he had FDR's other qualities. But most important, the country is not in a place that needs an FDR. Perhaps Biden has a hazy, nostalgic view of FDR, who was president when Biden was born in 1942, but he does not have a clear-eyed view of the country's condition right now.

"Assuming vaccinations allow us to get back to some type of economic normal, the problem is that all of the emergency spending (plus its momentum for future spending) will likely about double U.S. debt relative to GDP," notes Kevin Hassett, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers in the Trump White House. "The analogy is to the end of World War II, not the start of the Great Depression. A president who imagines himself launching the New Deal at this point is not FDR, he is Don Quixote."

Congress passed the $1.9 trillion "COVID relief" recovery program. that is still no accounted for.
Biden signed that into law.....he now wants another $3 trillion, maybe as much as $4 trillion, more in spending.

Why?

Oh, you silly......there's hundreds of greedy Bidens crawling around salivating for tax dollars.....
plotting the ways to get their filthy hands on our tax dollars........to become multi-billionaires

Hunter's drug and sex habit alone takes mega-bucks to sustain.

Plus there's Democraps all over the place wanting their share.

Do the math......it all adds up.....for them.

Interesting. I am reading a book about the Venona Files (an endeavor to read the Soviet’s intelligence community codes) and found out something I didn’t know.

Col. Carter Clarke, who was in charge of the project, said that in 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt complained about the decryption of the Soviet Messages and wanted it shut down. By his own account, Col. Clarke threatened to expose her objections to the press. (Not sure Clarke is totally trustworthy, but this revelation came from two sources)

Eleanor Roosevelt was a damned communist sympathizer at best, and I have no doubt that she was involved with making sure the Soviets knew we had compromised their code. (granted, for them, the cows were out the door by the time they knew, we already had a body of messages between 1943 and 1945 that were the meat of Venona)

The Roosevelt and Truman administrations were riddled with Soviet agents, and this (and a huge number of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “baseless accusations”) was confirmed by Venona.

I have often thought that McCarthy had a source with access to the Venona Project decryptions.

And both Roosevelt and Truman were repeatedly warned of this.

When Roosevelt was informed that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy, he told the person they were “full of sh*t”.

After Truman was warned repeatedly that Harry Dexter White was a Soviet agent of influence. Because of his high position in the administration, Harry Dexter White was not considered a formal “spy”, but was not only giving intelligence to the Soviets, but was acting as a high level shaper of policy as evidenced by his leading role at Bretton Woods with his buddy Alger Hiss involved in the creation of the UN.

But even though Truman knew that there were important people (such as J. Edgar Hoover) who knew that Harry Dexter White was a Soviet tool and had told him as much, he still appointed him to lead the International Monetary Fund. Years later, to cover his perfidy in doing this, he said it was to “keep him close”.

What a load of crap. I lost all respect for Truman in this and in his treatment of Joseph McCarthy.

Truman, a party hack if there ever was one, was the progenitor of today’s Democrat Party scum. He knew, and he put the political welfare of the Democrat Party far over the national security.

When you read the best account of the McCarthy persecution and political assassination “Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies” by M. Stanton Evans (someone who was actually alive, sentient, and following the action as a “Cub Reporter” at the time back in the early Fifties) it explains the actions of Truman.

Truman was a big Communist fighter as long as it didn’t threaten the Democrat Party. If it did, ignoring it or actively covering up Communist infiltration was the priority.

That is hard for some people to hear, no doubt.

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