Barak to the future?

That was on a bumper sticker back in 2008.  It is actually an apt metaphor, but not for the reasons Obama's supporters think.

The reason it is apt is because Obama is stuck in the past and he can't get back.  There's no Doc Brown to help him either.  As for the bumper sticker implying that Barak himself is the equivalent of Doc Brown, well that allows me to paraphrase what Lloyd Bentsen said to Dan Quayle in the '88 debate--  "Doc Brown was a favorite movie character of mine, I know his movies, I know his capabilities, and you Barak, are no Doc Brown!"

Krugman isn't Doc Brown either.  Krugman is stuck in the thirties.  He thinks Bush was Herbert Hoover.  He thinks today is like the Gilded Age of Robber Barons.  That may fool some people most of the time.  But those days, people were different than today.  They were probably a bit more like the Japanese, who save their money.  People today don't save enough money, and spend like drunken sailors on leave.  Krugman's ideas can only lead to greater debt, but without the savings that would enable that debt to be serviced.  We would still be stuck in the past.

We've been down the Krugman's Keynesian route.  Back in the late seventies, there was the same mode of thinking as of today.  Let's just spend our way out of our problems.  Let's learn to make do with less.  It was known as Jimmy Carter's little malaise pills.  They didn't give us a cure then, why should they do so today?

Barak likes to blame Bush, but Bush is qualitatively no different from himself.  Actually, Bush followed Keynesian doctrines too with his own version of a stimulus.  It didn't work, which shouldn't be too surprising with the poor track record.  Bush did do some supply side tax cuts, but it wasn't nearly what Reagan offered.  But Bush was no Reagan, as he gave us new entitlements, and additional new Keynesian type spending.  Blaming Bush is the same as blaming himself in some ways.  Yet, Bush's record was better at job creation than Barak.  Bush was more on the right track with his supply side tax cut than Barak's spending and tax increases. 

Bush wasn't quite there with tax policy.  We actually need some new growth drivers.  That's the way out of this mess.  But Barak is too beholden to environmentalism and doesn't really like economic growth.  Rather than that, he would prefer to spread the wealth around.  Huey P. Long thought up a similar idea during FDR's day.  That idea goes even beyond the New Deal.  It is also in the past, which confirms his behavior pattern.  Environmentalism is so far in the past, it is reminds one of Mathusianism, which was thought up over two centuries ago.  Talking about being stuck in the past!

Our most recent fling with prosperity was in the nineties.  There was a growth driver called the world wide web.  Find something similar to that, and you may be on your way.

But that isn't likely with a guy like Barak Obama.  He's too stuck in the past to get us back to the future. He's no Doc Brown.