Barack Hussein Obama has swept triumphantly into office with the winds of change in his wake. According to reports in the mainstream media, Americans suddenly feel that everything is going to be fine, despite the impending economic disaster, because Obama will not allow his people to suffer. He will somehow pay all our mortgages, make valedictorians of all our children, and cure cancer before his first one hundred days are finished. All of this has been encapsulated in a short video showing the elation Obama's election has created: click to watch the video

Obama built up huge expectations during the election. Constantly invoking the word change, but revealing few details of what this change would actually constitute, Obama created a frenzy of hope among the electorate. Can he possibly meet such high expectations? And just what kind of change is he planning?

A week before his inauguration, Barack Hussein Obama gave us insight into his plans for change in government. He has proposed the "American Recovery and Reinvestment" plan as a radical, never before attempted solution to our economic ills. Central to this proposal is spending our tax money to hire the unemployed to repair and improve the country's infrastructure. Those who have recently lost jobs will be paid to repair bridges and roads and to modernize 75% of federal buildings to improve their energy efficiency.ⁱ While Obama portrays his plan as change, it is actually a very old method of government intervention in the economy that has been tried before during Franklin Roosevelt's administration in the 1930's. FDR's programs were, to put it generously, colossal failures.

In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt was elected on a platform of a "new deal for the American people."ⁱⁱ Today, a candidate for president would instead say that the American people deserved change. FDR created a plethora of alphabet soup agencies as part of his "New Deal" program to raise America from the ashes of the Great Depression. Two of his agencies mirror Obama's current economic plan, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Public Works Administration (PWA).

The Public Works Administration began in 1933 with the purpose of funding projects such as roads, bridges, dams, schools, and hospitals. The goal of funding such projects was to decrease unemployment by hiring those who had lost jobs, just as Obama's public works plan aims to put the unemployed to work performing similar tasks. In the end, the PWA spent over $6 billion dollars and had very little effect on the unemployment rate, and those hired by the PWA found themselves unemployed yet again.ⁱⁱⁱ

Contemporaneous to the PWA was the Works Progress Administration. The WPA also hired unemployed people to build roads, bridges, parks, and other infrastructure projects. And, just like the PWA, the work was often temporary. Those who went to work for the WPA often found themselves unemployed again after a few months or years, and certainly no one made a career of the WPA as it was disbanded in 1943. In total, $11 billion of tax money was spent to fund the WPA^iv, but it did not provide any long term solution to the problem of unemployment. Barack Hussein Obama is following the same path with his American Recovery and Reinvestment plan.

To see the effects of Roosevelt's interventionist economic policies, see the following chart. Unemployment actually increased in some of the years these projects were in place!

Year	Unemployment rate
1923-29	3.3
1930	8.9
1931	15.9
1932	23.6
1933	24.9
1934	21.7
1935	20.1
1936	17
1937	14.3
1938	19
1939	17.2
1940	14.6
1941	9.9
1942	4.7

Source: United States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics^V

This chart shows that despite the billions of tax dollars spent, these programs barely put a dent in the unemployment rate of this country. Only when the nation began mobilizing for World War II and factories began hiring many people all over the country to build weapons, airplanes, and tanks, did the unemployment rate begin decreasing at a rapid rate, starting in 1941.

So Obama's change turns out to be the same old story after all instead of being new or revolutionary. FDR took similar steps to combat the dire economic circumstances of the Great Depression, but he failed. Barack Hussein Obama will probably be just as successful as FDR. Obama will confiscate our hard-earned money through taxation and borrow even more money from foreign countries to pay for his public works projects, but it will not provide any long term solution to the economic problems facing this country. We cannot tax and borrow our way into economic prosperity any more than you or I as individuals can become richer by charging everything on a credit card. The bills will one day come due, and that day will be a day of reckoning.


i-http://www.whitehouse.gov/agenda/economy/
ii-http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/f/franklin_d_roosevelt.html
iii-http://www.nps.gov/archive/elro/glossary/pwa.htm
iv-http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/wpa/wpa_info.html
v-http://www.bls.gov/opub/cwc/cm20030124ar03p1.htm

popup