Obama Flunks History, Mischaracterizes Herbert Hoover’s Economic Policy

Posted on | November 23, 2011 | 16 Comments

Ed Driscoll called this to my attention:

“This competition for new jobs and businesses and middle-class security, that’s the race I know we can win. But you don’t win it by saying every American is on their own. We’re not going to win it if we just hand out more tax cuts to people who don’t need them, let companies play by their own rules without any restriction, and we just hope somehow that the success of the wealthiest few translates in the prosperity for everybody else. We have tried that, by the way. We tried it for 10 years. It’s part of what got into the mess that we’re in. It doesn’t work. It didn’t work for Herbert Hoover, when it was called trickle-down economics during the Depression. It didn’t work between 2000 and 2008, and it won’t work today. And the reason it won’t work is because we are not a country that is built on survival of the fittest. That’s not who we are.”
— Barack Obama, Nov. 14, Kapolei, Hawaii

Hans Bader of Open Market:

Obama is dead wrong. Data from the White House’s own website shows that Hoover increased, rather than cut, spending in the Great Depression, and ran up deficits that were huge by historical standards.

I’ve said it before: They don’t teach economics at Harvard Law.

And apparently they don’t teach history, either.

Category: Barack Obama, Economics, History

Comments

16 Responses to “Obama Flunks History, Mischaracterizes Herbert Hoover’s Economic Policy”

DaveO
November 23rd, 2011 @ 9:55 am

Regardless of what Harvard teaches, it’s hard to learn when one is a SCOAMF.
Jorge Emilio Emrys Landivar
November 23rd, 2011 @ 9:59 am

Every time deficit stimulus has been tried it has failed miserably. And every time, Keynesians say that it was the fault of people not being Keynesian enough. Yet when spending cuts are tried instead, they succeed and they Keynesians ignore it.

This leads me to say that Keynesianism is religion not science as its unfalsifiable to its adherents.
Dave
November 23rd, 2011 @ 10:03 am

No, they do teach history at Harvard, and most other places of “higher” education.

It’s just that it’s all lies and propaganda.
Joe
November 23rd, 2011 @ 10:06 am

Correctamundo. Obama does not care, he just blames Republicans or Bush and goes with that. It is easier that way.

And every now and again, he is partially right. Sort of like a broken clock.
Garym
November 23rd, 2011 @ 10:40 am

Obastard relies on his media allies to cover for his purposefull deceipt, not to mention the legions of ignorance that worship at his alter.
Dcmick
November 23rd, 2011 @ 10:51 am

Law schools don’t cover such things. Nor do most colleges. You would have had to have taken a specialized course on the Great Depression or something to have come across that tid-bit from history in a college course.

Of course you could have read something about it on your own…. But that’s quite outside your collegiate responsibilities.

Which in Obama’s case consisted of keeping up with shady friends from Pakistan, who probably possessed the typically bizarre sexual hankerings of the men from that region.

There are more reasons than one that Michelle Obama is one miserable creature.
Dcmick
November 23rd, 2011 @ 10:53 am

And he also relies upon them to cover the deeds and the doings of his youth, and his no longer youth, particularly those doings and pursuings related to “the down low,” which as RSM once noted, rumbles and rumours thereof even reached him.
Dave C
November 23rd, 2011 @ 11:42 am

If only there was some sort of independent watchdog group.. That would report to the public at large about what the president said was historically inaccurate to the point of being flat out wrong.

Where they could press the leaders of the country on matters of the truth what’s right.. Hey, they could even be called the ‘Press’.

I’m going to get right on that.
JeffS
November 23rd, 2011 @ 12:34 pm

And when you put a SCOAMF into the middle of an atmosphere that (is supposed to) works hard and (beyond all doubt) parties hard, said SCOAMF will always gravitate towards the hard partying, and ignore the hard work.

“Learnin’? We doan need no steenkin’ learnin’!!!!“
Burke
November 23rd, 2011 @ 1:10 pm

Hoover raised the top rate from 25% to 65%.
Bob Belvedere
November 23rd, 2011 @ 1:34 pm

It seems our Historian-In-Chief was too busy to read Amity Shlaes book, The Forgotten Man.

http://www.amityshlaes.com/
Steve Funston
November 23rd, 2011 @ 4:35 pm

“It didn’t work between 2000 and 2008.” But wasn’t unemployment much lower then than it is now? I think it did work. What a SCOAMF we have as president.
Anonymous
November 23rd, 2011 @ 6:12 pm

Well it isn’t as if we didn’t already know we needed to abolish Harvard.
Quartermaster
November 23rd, 2011 @ 8:25 pm

Haravard is just another Libtard Seminary. Why would anyone expect TheWunWhoWun to have learned anything about the truth, except by exclusion? The current Harvard would scandalize its founders.
DavidD
November 23rd, 2011 @ 10:16 pm

“And the reason it won’t work is because we are not a country that is built on survival of the fittest.”

That’s funny. I thought Obama and all the other Leftists believed in all that Darwinistic claptrap about survival of the fittest.
BLBeamer
November 24th, 2011 @ 3:15 am

Another FAIL by the Smartest Man Who Ever Lived. According to Wikipedia, the first known use of trickle-down as an adjective meaning “relating to or working on the principle of trickle-down theory” was in 1944, while the first known use of trickle-down theory was in 1954.

Hoover had been out of office for over 10 years.