Economic Reckoning

The election campaign has entered its final phase with the administration irritatingly pretending that some sort of economic recovery is under way, and that a deficit-reduction plan that leads where a sane and numerate citizen might wish to go is in place. President Obama benefits from what Johnson and Macaulay called “the disingenuousness of years,” in this case, of the din of American electoral discourse that glories, often entertainingly, in partisan hyperbole.

The deficit is consigned to a category of perennial problems requiring some attention but in hand, as well as being entirely the fault of the previous regime. If progress is not as swift as is desired, it is yet indisputable and inexorable. And the agitations of the opposition, to the effect that conditions are more dire and that catastrophe impends, are just the excesses of unworthy office-seekers abusing the quadrennial right to frighten the voters in a poor cause.
Ronald Reagan made his national political debut in 1964 warning America that a vote for Lyndon Johnson was “the first step into a thousand years of darkness.” Over 61 percent of voting Americans took that step, and what they got was not a Great Society; but the Cassandras of 1964, including Richard Nixon and Reagan himself, sorted it out eventually. In 1932, Herbert Hoover warned that a vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a vote to make “grass grow in the streets of a hundred cities, a thousand towns, and for weeds to overrun a million farms.” Four consecutive elections of Roosevelt as president followed, and with them, victory over almost every foreign and domestic enemy, as unemployment shrank from 33 percent (and not the mere 25 percent claimed by anti-Roosevelt revisionists) to 0.25 percent.

Read more: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/327799/economic-reckoning-conrad-black