In this N&R letter to the editor, Stokesdale’s Tom McCoy says Republicans and depression go hand-in hand:
The Great Depression 1929-1941: Calvin Coolidge, another Republican, was president from 1923-1929. Herbert Hoover, another Republican, was president from 1929-1933. Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, was president from 1933-1945.
The assumption, of course, is the long-held belief that Roosevelt pulled the country out of the Depression, never mind the fact that things took a serious turn for the worse in 1937. At any rate, it just so happens that Jonah Goldberg (via Locker Room) asks who the real Hoovers are in today’s column:
Some of Hoover’s interventions were good but ineffectual. A few were very, very bad and very effective.
In 1932, Hoover in effect repealed Calvin Coolidge’s tax cuts, increasing the rates for the poorest taxpayers by more than 100 percent and hiking the top rate from 25 percent to 63 percent. Worse, contrary to his own better instincts, Hoover signed the disastrous Smoot-Hawley trade bill that raised protectionist walls at precisely the moment the world needed trade the most.
….Anyway, who are the real Hoovers here? Obama is sympathetic to protectionism, as is his party. He says he will raise taxes on the top income earners, and if he’s remotely honest about his spending ambitions, he will have to raise taxes on everybody else as well.
The way Obama confuses tax hikes with protectionism (it seems to me Kay Hagan is doing the same thing) is a troubling aspect of his economic plan. Raising taxes provides companies with the perfect excuse to leave the country, right? And that he’ll eventually have to raise taxes on the middle class is exactly the point IBD’s Tom McArdle made on O’Reilly the other night:
Well, this is a man, who according to the National Taxpayers Union, wants to spend $293 billion in extra spending annually. He is not going to be able to get all that money from the rich. He’s going to have to dip down into middle class, in spite of what he says about 95 percent of the middle class getting the tax cuts.
We, in fact, heard this before. We heard it from Bill Clinton. The centerpiece of his great economic plan in ’92, endorsed by all these economists, was a middle class tax cut. Bill Clinton was nodding off as one month before he gave an address to the nation saying not only is there not going to be a middle class tax cut, we’re going to have a middle class tax increase.
Everyone needs to be aware that Obama’s numbers just don’t add up, especially with the bailout looming.
