I exercised immense restraint, to make my comment about what stopped the Depression (wartime spending) as neutral as possible, not realizing the Right now has decided it wasn’t wartime spending that broke the unemployment of the 30s. You guys are rewriting history so fast its hard to keep up. I refrained from mentioning FDR or the New Deal, or how Hoover and the Republicans and their robber baron buddies blundered us into it with their extravagant and unprincipled business practices. I’m so, so sorry I used the word “stimulus” (legitimately and grammatically, by the way). I’d forgotten how sensitive you folks are to it.

But noooooo. Excuuuuuuse ME! Someone HAD to come up with a dissenting opinion, a way to put a stop to all that Bolshie babble. I know you see yourself as some kind of voice of truth keeping the unwashed from indiscriminantly spreading their foul propaganda everywhere, but you let nothing get past the censor. It is indeed, your way or the highway. Every little remark, every word has to get your seal of approval, or be buried in an avalanche of reactionary bullshit and cherry-picked and distorted statistics from one of your partisan websites or bogus authorities. We already know you’re a wingnut Tom, there’s no need to remind us. As long as you insist on being the hall monitor here, you must expect the occasional spitball.

The offer of a political moratorium still stands. Now that one other provocateur will be away for a few days, maybe we can make it work. If you don’t want to give up your soapbox, you’re just going to have to put up with the occasional rotten tomato from the crowd.

But the important thing to keep in mind is that in these issues there are differences of opinion. Honest and wise men look at the same facts and see different explanations. Maybe there is no truth, or if there is, we don’t really understand economics and history well enough to recognize it when we see it. Maybe the problem is just so complex that no single situation or set of rules can be used as a guide to deal with all possible situations.

Running a society and an economy is probably a lot more complex than living a life, or raising a child, and people can’t even agree on the right way to do that. People even do all the right things and still screw up, and vice versa. That alone should make us suspicious of those who insist they have all the answers.

Maybe both sides can meet halfway, or perhaps there is a third (or even many) “sides” we haven’t heard from yet. But until we can understand that there are some things that we simply do not agree on, and learn to live with that, there will be conflict.

And nothing creates conflict faster than accusing your opponent of being too stupid or too evil to see the obvious truth that you (of course) can plainly see.

I didn’t want to get in the middle of Tom and ER’s “discussion”. They’re plenty of papers and studies on the subject. Looking objectively at both sides, the whole of the matter, would be a better way to go. No need to go into “you’re lying, no you’re lying” mode.

The thing Economists do best it look at the past and explain what happened. At least they try.

Government spending, fiscal and monetary policy, and tax structure can only act as a catalyst. Recovery is dependent on the psyche of the people to turn things around. Recovery is a change in behavior.

We suffer economic ‘contractions’, people quit spending, investors move their assets into less risky investments. Businesses change their short term plans and have no solid outlook on the future. It’s a matter of fear.

I think instead of relying on economists we should talk to the people who lived and who climbed out of it. Business owners and entrepreneurs . We should study the behavior of those that were part of the 75% that were working. Unfortunately most people who were adults in the 30’s and 40’s are dead. You’d have to talk to the children of the era. But even those anecdotes would be distant memories.

With the divide shown here, it’s pretty clear economists and historians haven’t done their job.

The 2010 election was a fluke. After all, you can fool all the people some of the time. Now that America has actually seen what the Tea Party and their allies are capable of doing when they get their hands on power, it will not happen again.

The modern Right has no philosophy and no program. Their only goal is to create a world where unemployment and poverty force salaries down by keeping workers desperate and demoralized, where there are no unions to protect worker interests, where there are no regulations to protect worker, consumer and environmental health and safety, and where the propertied class pays no taxes and can operate without restraint.

In order to achieve this, the Right has cobbled together a malignant coalition of the most ignorant, brutish and superstitious members of society, with a frustrated, desperate and diminishing middle class that cannot tolerate this world of declining expectations it is pretty much responsible for creating itself.

I do not fear the Right winning the next election. In a fair election, America will get whatever government it deserves. What I am terrified of is what I now know the Right is capable of doing if it loses.

I think it’s pretty obvious who’s trying to rewrite history, and it’s just getting started.

For example, if you listen to the average Democrat right now you’d never know the Democrats had run the House and Senate since January of 2007, and run the whole damn government practically unopposed for two solid years between January of 2009 and January of 2011.

All of a sudden it’s those mean Republicans in the House today–you know, the ones who blew the Democrats away in 2010 (there’s that “vote that matters” thing)–who are somehow keeping poor Obama from finishing his Great Leap Forward.

While one feels quite superior watching them, it’s a bit like laughing at computer which gets it’s data from a random number generator and then outputs detailed analyses verifying a pre-ordained solution.

My job is simply to accept there are minds which can function by defining words for themselves and ignoring real-world input in favor of that which they want to be true.

That runs counter to everything I know and everything my friends know, and yet it can’t be denied there are people who live that way.

Remember, the Depression began late in 1929, FDR didn’t take office until early in 1933. The Depression not only came during Hoover’s watch because of Republican laissez-faire policies, Hoover had almost as much time to turn it around with those same reactionary policies as Obama has had to work with in the current emergency, and Hoover accomplished nothing, even with a friendly Congress. Absolutely nothing.

“The economy improved rapidly from 1933 to 1937, but then relapsed into a deep recession. The bipartisan Conservative Coalition that formed in 1937 prevented his packing the Supreme Court or passing any considerable legislation;” –http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt

Does that sound familiar, or what? Perhaps Obama hasn’t made the Recession go away, but he prevented a full Depression from occuring, and it infuriates the Right.

You’re terrified Obama might pull it off again and you would not only wind up with another FDR to explain away, but another Hoover to cover up for as well. You’d have to come up with another half-century of excuses, revisionism, hand waving, and ideological flatulence. That’s why your side has stopped at nothing to try to stop him, not even making a token effort to conceal they are doing it: obstruction, legislative blackmail, congressional extortion, demographic gerrymandering, parliamentary maneuver, obscene campaign financing, punishing those in your own party who refuse to cooperate, outright lies, even renouncing their own policies merely because they have been adopted by the Democrats; and (let’s not forget) enlisting, encouraging and pandering to some of the ugliest and most foul elements in our political culture and national psyche. You’re damned right there is more than one school of thought on this.

Don’t take my, or Wiki’s, or any historian or pundit’s word for it. The voters re-elected FDR for a fourth term. That’s all that matters, in a democracy only the vote matters. Everything else is just talk, talk, talk.

“…you can’t fool all the people all the time.”