Conspiracy theories and lies have a unique power to reshape the human mind. The things that we believe, even when we initially know that they’re a convenient rationalization, become a part of us. And eventually we come to build our entire worldview around a lie that we told long ago.
That’s the story of Russiagate, a bizarre conspiracy theory invented by the Clinton campaign and allies in the Obama administration that virtually every Democrat now believes is true. And it’s quite likely that Hillary Clinton, whose people made it up, also came to believe it’s true.
It’s also the story of the inflation crisis.
To understand how we got here, it helps to remember the last time a Democrat took over the White House during a troubled time with a mandate to save the economy. Time Magazine clumsily photoshopped him into a picture of FDR on its cover. The messianic ecstasy however soon gave way to frustration because Obama’s economic triumph never arrived.
The misnamed Recovery Act was a corrupt disaster, but, more relevantly for Democrats, it didn’t deliver anything meaningful and foreshadowed Obama’s transformation from the chosen one to just another politician. While Obama still did a great deal of damage, the FDR moment never came, and without it there was no momentum for a New Deal or a grander economic agenda.
Democrats and their think tank and academic allies refused to admit that the Recovery Act was a mistake. Instead, like all leftists, they insisted that the experiment hadn’t been properly tried. Just as Communism can never fail because it’s never been truly tried, the massive stimulus had never been properly tried either. The only problem with the Recovery Act was that it wasn’t big enough. Had Obama and the Democrats pulled off a truly huge package, they would have gotten their New Deal, held Congress and completely transformed America.
That excuse became the big lie that most people forget, but that the media occasionally kept warm and that Obama administration veterans carried with them into the Biden White House.
The rest is history and $6 eggs.
“The way I see it, the biggest risk is not going too big, it’s if we go too small. We’ve been here before. When this nation hit the Great Recession that Barack and I inherited in 2009, I was asked to lead the effort on the Economic Recovery Act to get it passed,” Biden assured the country in his speech. “But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t quite big enough. It stemmed the crisis, but the recovery could have been faster and even bigger.”
Senator Schumer scoffed to CNN, “We’re not going to make the mistake of 2008 and 2009 and do such a small measly proposal that it won’t get us out of the mess that we are in right now.”
The small measly proposal that Schumer was ridiculing had been a massive $800 billion.
He explained that the Democrats wouldn’t negotiate with Susan Collins, Murkowski or Romney because, “we cut back on the stimulus dramatically and we stayed in recession for five years.”
Biden and Schumer’s remarks showed just how thoroughly the Democrat elite had absorbed the ridiculous excuse for Obama’s economic failures. Even before the election, insiders were repeating the meme that Obama’s stimulus plan had been too small.
“Joe Biden doesn’t want to come into office and sit on a sloggy economy for four, six, eight quarters,” Jared Bernstein, who would become Biden’s chief economist, promised.
“Massive as it sounds, the next Covid bailout deal may already be too small,” Politico suggested.
Like a lot of bad Democrat ideas, the “too little spending” narrative began in part with Paul Krugman, the New York Times hack who has never failed to be wrong about anything, including his spectacular claim that “by 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
“This wasn’t a test of fiscal stimulus, even though it has played out that way in the political arena: the whole thing was obviously underpowered from the start,” Kruguman contended.
In, “Hey, Small Spender”, the absurdly wrong economist insisted that “the stimulus wasn’t actually all that big compared with the size of the economy” and that too much of it had been focused on tax cuts and “wasn’t mainly focused on increasing government spending.”
“If job-creating government spending has failed to bring down unemployment in the Obama era, it’s not because it doesn’t work; it’s because it wasn’t tried,” Krugman clamored.
In 2020, he was still arguing that, “Obama paid a heavy political price because recovery was too slow thanks to inadequate stimulus.”
In the years since, Democrats would point to aborted proposals for a $1.8 trillion stimulus plan and argue that it would have turned everything around. It’s no coincidence that Biden’s American Rescue Plan, one of the engines of the runaway inflation, crashed in at $1.9 trillion.
The Obama people were trying to make up for what they believed went wrong in 2009.
Communism hadn’t been properly tried and they tried it to the tune of $1.9 trillion.
What had actually happened in 2009 was that the leftists who championed government spending failed and were allowed to write a narrative in which they were right all along. Their conspiracy theory claimed that history would have come out very differently if not for Obama’s cowardice and Larry Summers introducing cautionary notes in the administration.
“So many bad things have followed from Obama’s caution back then. The course of history could have been very different,” Krugman mournfully complained in 2020.
This time around, they did it their way.
The Biden administration ignored Summers and went all in. Now it’s hunting around for someone to blame. According to a Bloomberg article, Biden has been yelling at his advisers and wondering if they “had paid too little heed to warnings that the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan would flood the economy with too much cash, acting as kindling for inflation.”
That was followed by the familiar coda. “If Biden and his economic aides, including Deese and Jared Bernstein, erred on the side of a larger stimulus it’s because they all worked in the Obama White House following the global financial crisis and witnessed firsthand how a too-small rescue package played a role in delaying a labor market recovery.”
The Biden administration had come to believe their own lies and excuses from a decade ago. And they will come up with new lies, excuses, and conspiracy theories to explain their current disaster. Eventually its veterans will learn to believe them and turn them into future policies.
“There’s a pretty good probability that we’ll look back on how America handled the pandemic shock, mostly under Biden, and see it as a big success story,” Krugman has continued to argue. He also denied the existence of inflation and is now busy rejecting the reality of a recession.
But for once Krugman is right. Whatever happens, he and his allies, and the rest of the media will look back and impose a narrative on the misery that we are all going through. Eventually they may decide that the trillions spent also weren’t enough and we should have done more.
And when the time is right, they will try to do it all over again.
Most of the money went to crooks and corruptocrats, not the little people.
Dims never reverse — only double down.
Dims are dimensions, dems are the leftist maggots you’re thinking of.
obama never had a recovery from the great recession that he, along with others in the new congress, both houses, who took over after 6 years of total Republican government that started with a klinton recession and turned into the longest running jobs expansion in history to that point…..Within one year of dim-0s taking over congress, the great recession began.
Again. obama did not inherit the great recession, he and other members of the new dim-0 congress created it, INTENTIONALLY, to use against W.
Horrible people who think themselves the smartest people in the room always( self delusion)..
Where did Obama and Blieden get the money from?
All major economic crises without exception have been caused by government intervention in the economy. The crisis of 2008, 2009 as well. Economic planning is impossible, it comes from a pretense of knowledge, from the irrational belief that governments have knowledge of all the factors, which is of course totally impossible.
Regarding the Great Depression, read: Lawrence W. Reed – GREAT MYTHS OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION / https://www.mackinac.org/archives/2020/GreatMythsFEE2020.pdf
2008: The causes of the crisis, in summary (see also in detail the Community Reinvestment Act, US federal law of 1977)
This crisis is the result of a set of factors, almost all linked to state interventionism:
– Federal Reserve low interest rate monetary policy
– anti-discrimination policy which forced banks to lend to insolvent households (political ambition of an “America of owners”)
– moral hazard disempowering banks and pushing them to take excessive risks
– financial complexity and opacity (securitization makes it possible to hide the risks)
Exactly correct.
The 2008-09 financial collapse (which wiped out half of my own 401-k, which I’d built up over 12 years for my hoped-for retirement–now impossible) was 100% caused by Barney Fwank and Christopher Dodd (“Dodd-Frank”), which forced banks to issue mortgages to badly unqualified buyers; and then the banks were “too big to [be allowed to] fail,” and thus MUST be bailed out by the Federal Government.
President Donald Trump (2016-2020) did much to restore and rebuild from the damage of the Obama years–economic, military, social, etc.–and could have done much more, had he not been sandbagged by the Dems and RINOs.
Under Trump’s policies, we were energy-independent for the first time in 70 years; the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was filled to capacity with $20/bbl oil (of which there was plenty); gasoline was $1.78/gal.; eggs were a little more than $1/doz.; inflation was nil, employment was negligible and workforce participation at the highest ever; there were no empty supermarket shelves; and Communist China wasn’t threatening Taiwan, nor Putin Ukraine.
[MORE, ATTACHED BELOW]
[CONTINUED FROM ABOVE]
Then the Wuhan Bioweapons Lab finished their Gain of Function development of COVID-19 (with the cooperation and funding of “Dr.” Anthony Fauci), and unleashed it against us with the intended results: crashing the Trump economy thanks to hysterical “lockdowns” by Dem governors and mayors, and turning a disease into a political bioweapon turning one American against another. Oh, and enriching Big Pharma like Pfizer with unimagined billions.
You don’t fix a Recession/Depression by crippling corporations with hyper-regulation (most of it “Green”) and destroying millions of jobs and businesses and then “compensating” by borrowing trillions (now an incredible $31 Trillion) mostly from our most dangerous foreign enemy–Communist China–and handing out inflated dollars to the unemployed.
You fix it by rescinding every suicidally, insane policy and “Executive Order” of Obama and Biden, and restoring the proven principles and practices of the fair free-market economy that we used to enjoy and prosper with, and that Trump, for his brief four years, did so much to restore.
Not sure why my Comment, in two parts, below, to meet word-count limits per post, is “Awaiting Moderation,” since there’s nothing to “moderate” about it–no profanity, no threats, no “disinformation” or “counterfacts.”
We’ll see if the Moderator rejects it, or goes ahead and posts is.
The great depression was extended by at least 7 years by fdr and his dim-0 policies.
He also ended creating a second depression in 1946, immediately after the end of WWII.
…that your history teacher or professor probably pretended didn’t exist.
You’re baffled a lot, aren’t you? Maybe if you read the article… “we cut back on the stimulus dramatically and we stayed in recession for five years.” – Chuck Schumer. You’re not keeping up with the everchanging dem ‘narrative.’ That wasn’t what chucky and the msm were saying at the time, of course, but once it was safe to do so…
You said it yourself, after 8 YEARS of obama, it was still just a “recovering economy.” Dems threw a party every time the economy broke their claimed 2% growth. And how about those “shovel ready jobs?”
He’s a leftist/satanist/troll. Even worse than he seems here.
Bush administration caused the housing market crash of 2008 Everyone should own a home. And greed caused the rest of it.
Not true. That has long been debunked.
The National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that the Democrats were entirely to blame for the Subprime Mortgage Crisis.
You’re funny. W has lost my support but he actually tried to head it off. Barney “roll the dice again” frank and maxine called him a racist and told him to get lost. The msm backed them all the way. The crash was triggered by a leak from a democrat party congressional staffer that a democrat owned bank was insolvent.
No, the policy of granting anyone who could fog a mirror a mortgage was Clintons policy. True, Bush didn’t do anything about it, but the policy was Clintons’ brain-child.
Actually Pres Bush tried to get congress to reign in Fanny & Freddy. He sent his people to the Hill over 17 times warning them of the ever-growing bubble & they refused to do anything. Maxine Waters even called him racist for it! Crazy huh? I found out later why congress refused to intervene. Political donations. Barney Franks, Chris Dodd, ETC.
Obamas biggest lie was claiming his Dictatorship/Presidency was without a single scandal
CORRECTION
“The small measly proposal that Schumer was ridiculing had been a massive $800 million.”
Million should be BILLION.
“The small measly proposal that Schumer was ridiculing had been a massive $800 million.” – it was $800 Billion.
I recall that when Obama’s first Great Idea of spending ~$950 Billion didn’t work, he next tried blowing through about $450 Billion. And when THAT didn’t work, he thought spending an additional ~$250 Billion WOULD !
IOWs, the definition of Insanity.
There’s a typo in the article. Obama’s stimulus was $800 billion, not $800. million.
“The small measly proposal that Schumer was ridiculing had been a massive $800 million.”
you’re right of course, thank you
It is said that governments cannot know all the effects of the direction they cause economy to take to understand what to do to repair said economy.
I say when your first priority is what is in it for the self interested politician then there is little to nothing left for the people you supposedly serve.
what is not mentioned is that the interest rates were kept artificially low through both Obama administrations so as not to notice the doubling of the debt under his watch…crushing debt is now built into our future as interest rates are once again ticking upward
Yeah, stagflation, like in the Carter years.
Obama was struggling to get GDP growth to 2%. He projected, “In the 21st Century, real GDP growth in the United States is likely to be permanently slower than it was in earlier eras . . . .” 2% was “the new normal.”
Trump enacted tax cuts and regulation reform. GDP growth was 2.3%, 3%, and 2.2% per year prior to the pandemic. The results benefited every demographic and enabled prosperity for everybody.
a. Largest wage increases for Blacks, Hispanics, single women, the disabled and those with criminal records
b. Wage increases higher for poor and middle class than the rich
c. The once-disappearing middle class started prospering after years of decline
d. Reducing income inequality from its peak during Obama’s administration
e. Lowest unemployment for minorities in history
f. Lowest poverty rate in US history
g. Dramatic increase in Gross Domestic Product – lifting all boats
h. Increased tax revenues due to more tax payers and higher incomes
But Democrats just yell, “Tax cuts for the rich.”
We must constantly remind people of all this. I’ve read things… That Trump was able to do what he did, because before him, Obama did what he did. We swim in delirium.
It seems that the only thing the democrats and their rino allies really care about when it comes to spending the American peoples money is, how much of it they can rake off the top for themselves.
EXACTLY! Leftists have been trying to re-write history since FDR
The Lefts, the socialist USA party and the USA Marxists all believe that their boy Obamy was the beginning of the end for the USA’s greatness, then came along Mr. Trump and he crapped in their party punch bowl.