Barack Obama is trying to end a recession and spark a recovery by the highly dubious means of shoveling vast amounts of federal dollars into domestic spending. He is consciously trying to mimic FDR and the New Deal. There is only one problem with this: FDR’s New Deal was an economic failure. Roosevelt tried a variety of different projects, programs, and spending to get us out of the Great Depression. Some of those, like the National Recovery Administration, were quite consciously modeled after the policies of Fascist Italy. Yet four years after Roosevelt took office, the economy was in worse shape than when he was elected.
