We have seen tax-and-tax spend-and-spend reach a fantastic total greater than in all the previous 170 years of our Republic.
Behind this plush curtain of tax and spend, three sinister spooks or
ghosts are mixing poison for the American people. They are the shades of
Mussolini, with his bureaucratic fascism; of Karl Marx, and his
socialism; and of Lord Keynes, with his perpetual government spending,
deficits, and inflation. And we added a new ideology of our own. That is
government give-away programs".
If you want to see pure socialism mixed with give-away programs, take a look at socialized medicine.
If you guessed Jim DeMint, you could be forgiven. He talks a lot like
this. But you'd be wrong. Newt Gingrich didn't utter these precise
words, either, although he uses much the same language and offers the
same themes.
You'd also be wrong if you guessed Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Tom
Pawlenty, Ron Paul, Haley Barbour, John Thune, Mitt Romney, or Mitch
Daniels. (Sarah Palin isn't attending.)
But again, your mistake would be understandable because these words
sound a lot like theirs. Any of them could have delivered this message -- and all of them have, over and over again. It's the Republican message
of 2011.
The perfectly correct answer is Herbert Hoover.
Herbert Hoover didn't deliver these words at this week's Conservative
Political Action Convention, though. He delivered them at the
Republican National Convention in Chicago on July 8, 1952.
That was almost 60 years ago.
Republicans haven't come up with a single new idea since. They haven't even come up with a new theme.
Herbert Hoover, you may remember, didn't have a sterling record when
it came to the economy. As president, he presided over the Great Crash
of 1929 and ushered in the Great Depression. He had no idea for what to
do to help the nation out of the Depression except to balance the
federal budget. By the time he was voted out of office in 1932, one out
of four Americans was unemployed.
By 1952, Hoover had been proven irrelevant and hidebound.
After Dwight D. Eisenhower won the 1952 Republican nomination and
went on to become president, he wisely disregarded everything Hoover had
advised.
Under Ike, the marginal income tax on America's highest earners was
91 percent. Eisenhower also commenced the biggest infrastructure program
in the nation's history -- the National Interstate and Defense Highway
Act, which replaced America's meandering two-lane roads with 40,000
miles of straight four and six-lane highways. He signed into law the
National Defense Education Act, which trained a whole generation of math
and science teachers, and upgraded American classrooms for the future.
The Federal Housing Authority subsidized home ownership. The Defense
Department spawned future technologies in aerospace and
telecommunications.
Did the U.S. suffer fascism, socialism, deficits and inflation, as
Hoover predicted? No. The U.S. economy soared. The median wage rose
faster than ever before. And the incomes of America's working class and
poor rose at the fastest pace of all.