The Ignorant Investor

I hear a lot of talk about FDR and the New Deal coming from democrats these days. I'm looking around at the economy, and I see a standard recession aggravated by the collapse of the banking system caused by deflating asset bubbles. Is the situation really as bad as the Great Depression? It occurs to me that democrats have every reason to invoke the memory of the Great Depression to scare people into accepting an expansion of social services they've longed favored but could not hope to get passed in post-Reagan America. This is politics. Truth counts for nothing.

The banking system needs to be fixed, and government will need to help out the folks who aren't working. But there is so much talk of FDR and his first Hundred Days that I feel like I did when Bush was pushing for the Iraq War. Like the threat of impending disaster is being used to rush headlong into new radical policies without consideration of the long term consequences. We've just traded neocons for neo-Roosevelts.