Obama: Catastrophe If Stimulus Delayed

From a breathless Associated Press:

Obama warns of catastrophe if stimulus delayed

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama says the recession will turn into a "catastrophe" if the economic stimulus is not passed quickly.

Obama rejected several criticisms of the plan: that tax cuts alone will solve the problem, or that longer-term goals such as energy independence and health care reform are not also critical to address at the same time. The White House released some of Obama’s remarks ahead of an event on executive compensation limits.

Obama subtly referenced his win in November while arguing that recalcitrant lawmakers need to get behind his approach.

Obama urged members of Congress "to act without delay" while also promising to "work to make it stronger."

Historically, recessions and depressions used to be called “panics.” Such as in the “The Great Panic Of 1873.”

And for a real reason. For much of these things are psychological.

Mr. Obama must know this.

So why is he doing his best with his histrionics to drive down the economy?

Mr. Emanuel knows why. As did Mr. Alinsky.

Mr. Obama even admitted it in his second autobiography, The Audacity Of Hope – Thoughts On Reclaiming The American Dream, pp 90-91:

Opportunity

Finally—and most controversially—government has helped structure the social compact between business and the American worker…

Again, it took the shock of the Great Depression, with a third of all people finding themselves out of work, ill housed, ill clothed, and ill fed, for government to correct this imbalance. Two years into office, FDR was able to push through Congress the Social Security Act of 1935, the centerpiece of the new welfare state, a safety net that would lift almost half of all senior citizens out of poverty, provide unemployment insurance for those who had lost their jobs, and provide modest welfare payments to the disabled and the elderly poor. FDR also initiated laws that fundamentally changed the relationship between capital and labor: the forty-hour workweek, child labor laws, and minimum wage laws; and the National Labor Relations Act, which made it possible to organize broad-based industrial unions and forced employers to bargain in good faith…

For a while this seemed to be where the story would end—with FDR saving capitalism from itself through an activist federal government that invests in its people and infrastructure, regulates the marketplace, and protects labor from chronic deprivation. And in fact, for the next twenty-five years, through Republican and Democratic administrations, this model of the American welfare state enjoyed a broad consensus. There were those on the right who complained of creeping socialism, and those on the left who believed FDR had not gone far enough…

Obviously, Mr. Obama is of the second camp. those who believe “FDR had not gone far enough.”