Why would anyone contemplate a New New Deal? The old New Deal was an atrocious failure in prolonging the Great Depression through such idiotic policies as paying farmers to uproot cops and jailing tailors for charging too little for services rendered. The Depression never really ended until World War II. Elsewhere in the world the economic downturn was not as severe or as prolonged. Why was America different? FDR's harebrained economic policies.

The very fact that the Left touts a 75-year-old set of ideas as a prescription for what ails America today demonstrates how intellectually stale leftists are. Yet, there is this tic of dubbing any leftist idea, even ones decades old, as "new." Even the old New Deal wasn't anything cutting edge. It recycled ideas from American populists and progressives, with a splash of European fascism (National Recovery Administration) and European socialism (confiscatory tax rates that rose to 91 percent by FDR's death) thrown in for good measure. The very name "New Deal" was even an amalgamation of the first President Roosevelt's "Square Deal" and Woodrow Wilson's "New Freedom." On the Left, everything old is eventually new again.

Add to all this the transformative nature of the Bush presidency, which has shown that if the "era of big government" was over in the Clinton years, it has returned in full force during George W. Bush's reign of error. No Child Left Behind, the Prescription Drug Giveaway, nationalization of airport security, banks, and the largest insurance company in the world are a few of the dramatic power plays by the federal government during the last eight years. Who needs a another new New Deal when we have just lived through one?

The talk among the Obamaites of a new New Deal proves the importance of rebutting bad ideas when they strike, not years later when the facts become convoluted in the public's mind. The Democratic Party has gotten away with spinning a historical yarn that posits that Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal ended the Great Depression. It didn't. It made it worse. Whenever critics pointed out the obvious failings of Roosevelt's policies then, the spectre of Herbert Hoover was usually good enough to rebut those critics. The irony is that Hoover championed many of the same big-government policies that his successor embraced. The same is true of George W. Bush, who will prove a convenient scapegoat for Barack Obama, as Hoover did for Roosevelt, whenever the economy doesn't react in the hoped-for manner when government encroaches.

Actually the era of big government was over after Republicans won control of Congress, and the era of gargantuan government commenced. Democrats at least are more honest about their agenda; Republicans are just malicious liars.

This all doesn’t matter. Because the next Democratic President, based on what he said in a 2001 interview, thinks that the Constitution is out of date and that we need a stronger Judiciary, starting with the Supreme Court, to redefine it.

Happy days are still here again
The skies above are still unclear again
So let's bail out Wall Street again
Happy days are still here again.

At the rate the Government is printing money pretty soon monopoly money and confederate money will have the same value. There is not a dime's worth of difference between the two parties with the exception of some who have spoken against the nonsense that is being thrown at us from day to day.

Obama is an egghead who has been nurtured through a liberal academia that has a stranglehold on our networks and media outlets. I am disheartened to see that America can't see through all this.

Dan, I could chime in with some like-minded thoughts, but I prefer to sit back and watch you shine in your element. I do, indeed, think you are at your best when discussing economics. Keep up the great work. The great capitalist philosophers of the 20th century did a great job of expressing the "let it be" line of reasoning. However, few have put it so simply and elloquently.