Reagan has never been my cup of tea so part of me feels like why should being like Reagan be a compliment? More than one liberal has gotten upset with the President over his interest in Reagan while they claim eschewing FDR.
It's funny because this post is about pointing out the misconception of Obama the European style socialist the Right likes to peddle. However, the idea that Obama failed to fill FDR's big Keynesian shoes. To the contrary; I mean don't get me wrong, FDR was a great President and New Deal is one of the best legacies in the history of the nation.
In reality though, FDR was no Keynesian. For one thing, Keynesianism wasn't even 'born yet' when FDR took office in 1933-while Keynes wrote General Theory in 1936. Besides that FDR ran as a deficit hawk against Hoover promising to cut the deficit-so a platform of austerity!-and running deficits only reluctantly-to the nation's detriment in 1938 when he pulled back too soon.
Obama's ARRA remains the largest fiscal stimulus in history-even though it should have been better had it been larger contrary to Scot Sumner and friends.
http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/01/what-it-would-take-to-disprove.html
I'm anything sooner than a Reaganphile but I get the parallel Obama wants to draw in terms of being a transformational President.
If you didn't watch the President's SOTU speech tonight you should have. You can read it here.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/obama-state-of-the-union-2015-full-text
It was a great speech particuarly the part where after there was some guffawing after he said he will never have another campaign again said 'I should know, I won both.'
http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-i-know-cause-i-won-both-of-them-2015-1
Certainly he and his team came in with an ambitious agenda-to be 'the Reagan of the Left.'
"Barack Obama wants to mainline progressivism into the bloodstream of America the way Ronald Reagan ushered in a generation of conservatism."
It's funny because this post is about pointing out the misconception of Obama the European style socialist the Right likes to peddle. However, the idea that Obama failed to fill FDR's big Keynesian shoes. To the contrary; I mean don't get me wrong, FDR was a great President and New Deal is one of the best legacies in the history of the nation.
In reality though, FDR was no Keynesian. For one thing, Keynesianism wasn't even 'born yet' when FDR took office in 1933-while Keynes wrote General Theory in 1936. Besides that FDR ran as a deficit hawk against Hoover promising to cut the deficit-so a platform of austerity!-and running deficits only reluctantly-to the nation's detriment in 1938 when he pulled back too soon.
Obama's ARRA remains the largest fiscal stimulus in history-even though it should have been better had it been larger contrary to Scot Sumner and friends.
http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/01/what-it-would-take-to-disprove.html
I'm anything sooner than a Reaganphile but I get the parallel Obama wants to draw in terms of being a transformational President.
If you didn't watch the President's SOTU speech tonight you should have. You can read it here.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/obama-state-of-the-union-2015-full-text
It was a great speech particuarly the part where after there was some guffawing after he said he will never have another campaign again said 'I should know, I won both.'
http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-i-know-cause-i-won-both-of-them-2015-1
Certainly he and his team came in with an ambitious agenda-to be 'the Reagan of the Left.'
"Barack Obama wants to mainline progressivism into the bloodstream of America the way Ronald Reagan ushered in a generation of conservatism."
"This is about something bigger than 2016," a senior Obama administration official said before the speech. "It's like — can we change the frame of the debate, where, like Reagan was able to basically constrain the political debate around no-new-taxes and small government, we can do the same thing around an economic philosophy that invests in the middle class of the country and asks the wealthy to pay a little more. And to beat back the politics of austerity. So that's the long-term thinking."
Obama has never hid his admiration for the way that Reagan, as he put it during the 2008 presidential campaign, "changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not."
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/barack-obama-progressive-ronald-reagan
In other words, Nixon got elected twice but didn't achieve an ideological shift in American politics and neither did Clinton unlike Reagan. I definitely thought the President did a great job with a two pronged approach. First, he kind of declared the economic crisis over and pointed out all the jobs created over the last 6 years and the steep drop in unemployment.
After that though he didn't just say like Bush in Iraq back in 2003, 'Mission accomplished' but pointed to the next step which is to raise wages and living standards and make sure prosperity is more widely shared than it has been during the recovery.
Some Republicans have claimed that the President's proposals were those of a European Socialist but actually it's quite to the contrary. His proposals were all about using the tax codes to put money in people's pockets.
"Republicans obviously don’t like the upper income tax increases that he would use to pay for it. Nearly every Republican in Congress has signedGrover Norquist’s pledge stating that they will never, ever, ever raise taxes, and if they do may they be cast into the Lake of Fire to endure an eternity of torment and woe (at least I think that’s what the non-public version says). Which helps explain why their most passionate advocacy comes in the noble cause of cutting taxes, particularly for the wealthy, and raising some taxes in order to cut others is not something they can tolerate."
Obama has never hid his admiration for the way that Reagan, as he put it during the 2008 presidential campaign, "changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not."
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/barack-obama-progressive-ronald-reagan
In other words, Nixon got elected twice but didn't achieve an ideological shift in American politics and neither did Clinton unlike Reagan. I definitely thought the President did a great job with a two pronged approach. First, he kind of declared the economic crisis over and pointed out all the jobs created over the last 6 years and the steep drop in unemployment.
After that though he didn't just say like Bush in Iraq back in 2003, 'Mission accomplished' but pointed to the next step which is to raise wages and living standards and make sure prosperity is more widely shared than it has been during the recovery.
Some Republicans have claimed that the President's proposals were those of a European Socialist but actually it's quite to the contrary. His proposals were all about using the tax codes to put money in people's pockets.
"Republicans obviously don’t like the upper income tax increases that he would use to pay for it. Nearly every Republican in Congress has signedGrover Norquist’s pledge stating that they will never, ever, ever raise taxes, and if they do may they be cast into the Lake of Fire to endure an eternity of torment and woe (at least I think that’s what the non-public version says). Which helps explain why their most passionate advocacy comes in the noble cause of cutting taxes, particularly for the wealthy, and raising some taxes in order to cut others is not something they can tolerate."
"But Republicans might want to consider the possibility that the progressivity of both our tax code and the services the federal government provides actually serves the conservative vision of government quite nicely. While Barack Obama is often accused by his opponents of being a European-style socialist, the truth is that most European countries haveless progressive tax systems than we do, in part because they rely on value-added taxes that are akin to sales taxes. Obama’s proposals would make federal taxes a bit more progressive, and therefore, more distinctly American."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/01/20/republicans-should-actually-like-obamas-tax-cut-proposals-heres-why/
Ironically, in many ways this approach also owes something to Reagan. Since the huge Reagan tax cuts in the 80s, the Dems have had a choice of how to go about answering it. Dems have mostly decided not to undo most of those cuts. While Obama is talking about raising tax cuts for the 1% he's looking to effectively lower them for the average guy via tax credits paid for by the rise on the 1%.
It's like the Bush tax cuts-Democrats kept 97% of them ending them only for the top 1%. So this preference for a progressive tax code is the opposite of how European socialists operate and in a way owes something to Reagan as well.
Ironically it's conservatives these days who want a value-added or consumption style tax-like Sumner wants. The conservatives are pushing for a more regressive-ie, European socialist-tax code. Not exactly like Reagan.
Nothing like Obama.
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