Just curious- has anyone out there taken Bush’s plan from 2005 to privatize social security and gamed it out using the current economic climate to see what would have happened?
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[…] in Bush Administration, Business, Daily life, GOP, Government at 12:14 pm by LeisureGuy Here it is: Just curious- has anyone out there taken Bush’s plan from 2005 to privatize social security and […]
Tom65
Certainly not the Cato Institute.
Keith
I tried, but I got a DivideByZero error
Ron Beasley
Good One Keith!
Napoleon
What would have happened is that some people would be hanging from lamp post by now as the revolution was in full swing.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Of course not. I attribute this to the same force that prevents people on the tv from informing viewers that the expiration of the Bush tax cuts will result in folks in the top bracket paying the same rate they did under Clinton and Reagan.
Ricky Bobby
I asked in a previous thread if anyone had wood these days for privatizing social security. People weren’t all that excited about it when they were getting their glowing retirement account statements from Bernie Maddoff, I imagine they would be storming down to Crawford Ranch to interrupt W’s brush clearing efforts for their checks if that idea had passed.
When in doubt, just privatize it!
Or cover it in gas, light it on fire, and shoot it out of a cannon into the sun. Same thing really.
geg6
I’m guessing, just a guess mind you, that we’d all put a bullet in our heads if anyone attempted that.
However, I think I’ve found a foolproof investment scheme based on…wait for it…the prognostic stylings of one Jim Cramer:
http://www.myprops.org/content/Jim-Cramers-2009-Predictions-vs-Actual/?link=reddit
It’s like George Costanza. Just do whatever the opposite may be.
WIN!
John Cole
I doubt much would have happened, TBH. Too early for those accounts.
amorphous
Not I, and I won’t. I am far too busy planning my campaign against Chuck Norris for the Presidency of Texas.
gbear
In the ‘It could be worse’ department: You could be a member of Norm Coleman’s IT team. Coleman is urging everyone who donated to his recount campaign to cancel their credit cards. His web site had breach that the Coleman folks knew about in January but didn’t do anything about until someone blew the whistle on them this week. Norm claims that the whole thing is a dirty campaign trick. Moran.
Comrade Dread
Old retirement plan: Social Security and a pension and a responsible lifestyle.
Bush retirement plan: A weekly can of cat food and some shredded stock certificates for fiber.
Michael
We’d be in the most bubblicious time of all bubblicious times, as CEOs and Wall Street whiz kids would have been gambolling about in pools full of cash and using Beluga Caviar as a face ointment.
When the crash would have come about, it would not have been recoverable, and yes, there’d have been a bloody, violent revolution.
MikeJ
That darned Ned Lamont!
TenguPhule
Yes. The Entire Bush clan gets slaughtered and eaten by cannabalistic humanoid underground dwellers.
American civilization collapses.
Liberals inherit the Earth and bitch up a storm at the mess its been left in.
Keith
Here’s a prediction: within 1 week, *some* right-wing blog will suggest that privatizing SS right now is a *good* idea because it would be effectively inserting stimulus (aka retirement) dollars into the investment market. Then it’ll get picked up by Fox n Friends/Drudge for an AM cycle, whereby John Boehner will pick up the ball by the end of the evening, and it will actually be something the push for. Next, the punditry will start to push it on the weekend shows, and the Halperins of the world will suggest it as well, all the while, non-Rasmussan polls will show that the vast majority of Americans really do *not* want to invest in a possibly bottomed-out market because it’s pretty damn apparent that said market is inherently unstable.
It’s the GOP double-down strategy that we’ve all come to know and love.
Michael
OT, but here’s a funny bit from Glenn Beck. He is in his "Doom Bunker" mode, talking about the evil of the Connecticut legislature amending some organizational aspects of the law that religious institutions use to corporatize their assets.
Faith itself is under attack!
http://conservativexpress.blogspot.com/2009/03/video-glenn-beck-faith-is-under-attack.html
Perhaps if the churches don’t want these sorts of laws amended, they’ll refrain from demanding that laws be arranged to accomodate them in incorporating their stuff.
MattF
I’d guess that Bush & Co generated simulations that showed how rich everyone would be if their plan had been in effect. Might be edifying to re-run them now.
Michael
If some evil liberal who hates America and the troops (ahem) went and did that now, wonder if he could actually steer the first spin?
Jay Severin Has A Small Pen1s
I did.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVrAv2D1H0I
Ron Beasley
Another Good One Keith!
You are on a roll.
Napoleon
@Comrade Dread:
I read something in the last week to the effect that during the Great Depression they called a wild rabbit you would catch and eat for dinner something line Hoover Livestock. Perhaps we can start calling cat food Bush Sushi or something.
gbear
@Keith:
Keith, can I contact you for investment advice? I think your prognosticative instincts are 1000%.
Fritz
Good question. But how much confidence should people have that the the large and growing stack of IOU notes in the FICA till will be worth much once the baby boomers start tapping in?
khead
I don’t know about the actual numbers, but I expect it would’ve played out a lot like the WV Teachers pension plan switch where people asked for a do-over.
geg6
@Michael:
Not to mention that this entire legislative initiative is a result of RC priests’ man-boy love. I read about this in Sully’s blog the other day. I think that there are people and parishes there who don’t, apparently, take well the idea that the hierarchy conspired to make sure their young ‘uns got molested by the revolve-the-pedophiles-around-and-maybe-no-one-will-notice tactic that failed spectacularly and publicly a few years ago. Seems they see it as some sort of "conspiracy" perpetrated on them by a hierarchy of misogynistic, closeted, control freaks who frequently wear bejeweled gowns and high heeled designer shoes in the name of Jeebus.
Axe Diesel Palin
I wonder if the extra cash going into the market would have inflated the bubble more and perhaps delayed its inevitable pop. This is a complete guess, but perhaps it would have delayed the pop to the 2nd or 3rd year of the next president’s term. Bush would have gone down in history as a financial genius, and the sap who succeeded him would have been the goat.
KevinD
@Keith: Keith has the power to see the future, like Dr Manhattan. Now if he could just wisk these these wingnuts to the surface of Mars, we’d be good.
Brick Oven Bill
The way I see it Sheila Bair is fighting a losing battle. Sheila’s $19 billion insures $4.8 trillion in deposits. So if the FDIC falls, congress will have to backstop the banks, or else the government is all done. This might be done in cash, but this would be inflationary. So the government will probably give depositors IOUs, in the form of Treasury Bonds, and put restrictions on withdrawals from the banks.
In effect, we will not privatize Social Security, the government will instead nationalize and control your bank and retirement accounts. After all, who really needs access to their $25,000, when there are so many people suffering? Oh, and don’t expect too much out of Social Security either. There are medicine salesmen sitting around me. They probably think they have secure jobs.
Brachiator
I recall a "Fresh Air" interview with someone from the Heritage Foundation who admitted that people might likely receive less money if Social Security were privatized. He didn’t care. His point was the larger PHILOSOPHICAL issue that the government should not be involved in an employee’s retirement plans.
Also, Wall Street Journal Conservatives absolutely hate that employers have to kick in a portion of the social security contribution. They swear up and down that employers would increase wages if they didn’t have to pay evil payroll taxes. George Will has been pushing this as well on recent episodes of the Sunday news show on which he appears.
And don’t get me started on how Roth IRAs create tax free wealth for plutocrats.
Privatization is little more than a stalking horse for class warfare.
LD50
"I read something in the last week to the effect that during the Great Depression they called a wild rabbit you would catch and eat for dinner something line Hoover Livestock."
In German-occupied Holland, when the Dutch people were reduced to eating cats, they called them ‘roof rabbits’.
Shygetz
How much money do you think it would take to buy a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal? I’d like one that gave illustrated instructions on how to build a guillotine, with the words "Paid for by the American Taxpayer" written at the bottom. How do you think that would go over?
geg6
@Shygetz:
I’ll pony up my share for it.
Napoleon
@Brachiator:
I was reading something on the exercise bike this morning, I think maybe it was Chait’s review of Amity Shlaes (sp?) book and he mentioned something to the effect that Hoover admitted that even if you could show the government could do something more effectively then the private sector that he believed the government still should not be permitted to do it. The far right always have had certain ideological goals and facts have nothing to do with them.
Comrade Stuck
Ever see an army of blood thirsty grannies wielding pitchforks and sharpened dentures. That’s how it would game out. George Bush and the wingnuts would be paddling hard for Paraguay.
Just ask Dan Rostenkoski
dadanarchist
@Shygetz:
I don’t know but I’m in for $100….
thomas
Keith is definately on to something.
Joshua Norton
Every time there’s a stock market bubble people start screaming "give my money so I can invest it myself". The same thing happened 9 years ago during the dot com craziness. Everyone wanted to buy over-priced IPO’s and make a quick killing. Didn’t quite work out that way.
I was talking to my Dr. the other day, who is planning to retire soon. He did some calculating with his various stocks and mutual funds and said with all the swings and market fluctuations, he could have just invested in long term CD’s at 5% and still have ended up in the same place he is now. Playing the market with your nest egg is a fool’s game. Might as well take a trip to Vegas and bet it all on red.
I’d say let them do it and live with the losses, but you know the government would have to support them after they lost everything and started living in the streets. So screw ’em. Social Security is there and leave it the fuck alone. It isn’t "your money" until you start collecting it.
chrome agnomen
OT, but damn, these are the best threads on the intertubes. one coffee snort after another.
Church Lady
Just out of curiosity, what are our Social Security contributions invested in? Is it in Treasuries? Aren’t those paying, like, zero right now?
Keith
I’m more of a "vaporize ’em with a wave of my hand" kinda person, although the surface of Mars thing wouldn’t be too bad in a "Total Recall" dream sequence manner.
Just Some Fuckhead
All my friends and family who have been investing in their 401Ks dutifully for the last xx years have pretty much nothing to show for it. Meanwhile, I eschewed retirement savings and instead focused on buying a bunch of cool shit.
Grasshoppers: 1
Ants: 0
dadanarchist
@Keith:
I like the Mars experiment.
When, sticking to good wingnut principles, they privatize the oxygen production equipment without any regulation, they’d all suffocate, as reducing prices and demanding proper maintenance and regular services is "socialism."
bvac
Didn’t the Republicans do that in 2005 when they were rock hard about diverting the billions invested in social security to wall street? I could have sworn one of their tactics was one of those counter type things that said like "Under Dear Leader Bush’s private savings plan you would get $XX dollars more in retirement!" and it was pegged to the stock market in real time. It was probably in between "Warrantless wiretapping and waterboarding have kept us safe from the next 9/11 for XX days!" and "XX days until Hillary Clinton becomes president"
In any case, they ditched that idea and their strategy now is apparently just flat out cutting SS benefits… oh, and more tax cuts.
Tsulagi
That could be the positive theme for Bush’s upcoming legacy tour of speaking engagements. Maybe Condi will travel with him to deliver her patented “No one could ever have anticipated…” after he highlights his pre-globalFUBAR successes.
Comrade Stuck
OT
The Party of Limbaugh.
Mr Furious
Awesome, Fuckhead. Awesome.
Dave S.
To answer the original question, I think there would be a lot of lucky duckies out there.
passerby
@geg6:
@Shygetz:
Count me in. I think this is a sparkling idea.
Sounds like a project for MoveOn. They’re currently slamming the health insurance industry. (YouTube MoveOn Ad)
camchuck
Nothing that couldn’t be fixed with a cut in the capital gains tax. /your Republican party
kay
@bvac:
No. They used actuarial figures that "proved" that black people benefited less than white people from Social Security contributions, because black people die faster. Except they don’t. There’s a spike. Black people have higher mortality rates from infant through teenage years. After that, it levels off. Once they start collecting, in other words, the difference between black and white longevity is negligible. It was complete bullshit. That didn’t stop them from repeating it 90 million times, well after they knew it wasn’t true.
passerby
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Not being much for gambling myself, I went this route too.
KevinD
@Keith: Yeah, vaporize would be too easy, I want to see the eyeballs popping out.
And apparently I’m stuttering when I type, must be the building rage):(
David Hunt
My favorite end for that story was told by a character played by Don Amiche 20+ years ago in a movie whose title I can’t remember. "Winter comes. The grasshopper, he eats the ant."
Yelli
Ask the Italians:
http://bruceweb.blogspot.com/2009/01/italian-pension-privatization.html
gbear
@Just Some Fuckhead:
My dad passed away a few years ago and my sisters and I received about $20k each from his estate. I bought a new computer but then figured I should be a good son and put the rest into a 401k week by week at work. My dad was so super conservative financially that I (fortunately) decided that a third of the money should go into straight savings w/ no risk. In the end, I spent the last third of the money on a 250cc scooter. The remaining third that went to the stock marked has pretty much vaporized. I am so freakin’ happy that I bought that scooter.
grasshopper: +1/3
ant: -1/3
super conservative dad guilt: +1/3
kay
“Minorities are greatly helped by disability and survivor benefits in the Social Security system and would be hurt by an overhaul that instead linked benefits mostly to contributions, congressional auditors said Wednesday. The General Accounting Office report issued Wednesday appeared to contradict contentions by supporters of Social Security-linked personal investment accounts that minorities fare worse in the current system.”
It’s from the GAO. They finally had to step in before the lie took hold.
It’s a nice way of saying President Bush was making stuff up again. He continued to claim black people were harmed by Social Security, despite this report. He just knew they were, in his heart.
geg6
@kay:
That’s because he looked them in the eyes and saw their souls, doncha know.
Brachiator
@Church Lady:
The all-knowing Wiki has the answer:
In short: Conservatives also want to kill Social Security because doing so would deprive the federal government of revenues. Whenever there is a Social Security surplus, the federal general fund benefits.
See how class warfare works?
Helping people makes them weak. If the people are weak, the society is weak. I think that’s how the wingnut mentality goes.
AC
I think it’s pretty simple to game this out using Excel. You take the formula they used for Iraq planning and replace it with privatize social security. I think it looks something like this (ymmv as my Excel isn’t prolevel):
=SUM(CountryWithSurplus+((Privatizesocialsecurity)*Bushplan))
The result you should see in both cells is "We’re Fucked".
Napoleon
I think that is only if you buy certain short/med term bonds on the secondary market. The SS admin. buys original issue, and as long as they hold them to maturity they get the full stated rate on the bond.
John PM
John Cole – It looks like you have yourself the beginnings of a fantastic alternative history novel. Quick, hop to it before Harry Turtledove takes the idea; he writes like 20 books a year.
gex
@amorphous: Wha? President of Texas means we get home the home of W and the Christian Reconstructionist movement to secede from the US. Why prevent that?
AC
Oh crap, my Excel got too cute. Fail.
Basically = countrywithsurplus + privatizesocialsecurity*bushplan
Results in a cell equaling "We’refucked"
Wow. Whoever said if you have to explain your joke it’s not funny is right. Sorry about that.
Mike in NC
Adjusted in the interest of accuracy.
It’s called dogma, or theology, among these people. Chait notes that the entire GOP has jumped on the "New Deal Failure" bandwagon and are waving The Forgotten Man as if it were the Little Red Book of Chairman Mao. Naturally, you can damn well bet that none of them — Gingrich, Boehner, Cantor, Pence, etc. — have actually read the thing.
Fritz
Of course, those government bonds that FICA has in its drawer will be paid back in dollars. The real fun question is how the US government will get all of those dollars when it needs them. Maybe it will just print the money — as the British government is starting to do. Well, at least we won’t be worrying about deflation.
Punchy
OT:
Can someone suss out the ramifications of this shizzle? Being somewhat of a legal anti-savant, I know very little about what manslaughter is, other than accidental death. So if a fetus is granted "personhood", how could a miscarriage not be considered some form of manslaughter or reckless endangerment or abuse charge?
Or am I on crack here?
gbear
We’d need to set up Oklahoma City as a refugee destination for all of the GLBT folks that would have to flee Texastan. Oklahoma City will become fabulous!!
geg6
I can haz more Dems lik dis?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jO5Z-9yy54
Martin
I’m not sure beer volcanos and stripper factories would be enough to make OKC fabulous.
Napoleon
OT, but Ross Douthat is the NY Times new conservative columnist.
kay
@geg6:
I was mad. They all repeated it, on the Right. President Bush repeated it at Social Security town hall meetings. It didn’t reach "death" tax levels of lying, but it was right up there.
Imagine if Obama told some outrageous lie about white people and Social Security, over and over. It’d be "headline news" with endless analysis on whether it was racially divisive. Bush got a complete pass.
woody
Anytime anybody talks about ‘reforming entitlements,’ that’s always at LEAST in the sub-text of the remarks…
It’s the last, vast untapped pool of cash in the country ("untapped" meaning not invested in making the rich richer). Kinda like the oil/gas/minerals under the Caspian Sea are the last vast untapped pool of energy–which, in the final analysis, is why the US is adventuring in Central Asia.
JenJen
Off-topic, but jeebus… Wolf Blitzer just reported a "developing story" that in a new survey, 60% of voters give Obama an "F" on his performance as President.
So I’m listening to Blitzer report this with a straight face and I’m thinking, "WTF? That sounds sketchy." Then, the google told me that it was an MSNBC ONLINE POLL. And the first hit came from WorldNutDaily.
The news producers at CNN are very serious people; so serious, they’d promote a rival network’s stupid online poll just to prove that Everybody Hate Obama.
Someone alert Atrios that it’s time for another blogger ethics panel!
geg6
@kay:
Sadly, just one of the many lying memes of the last 8 years and, even more sadly, not even the most outrageous one.
If it makes you feel any better, I have some good news for you. Seems Levi Johnston and Bristol Palin have broken up and the fallout is everyone’s trailer trash/cracker/meth dealer dream cat fight pitting Levi’s sister and Bristol, according to Star magazine. That poor, poor child, little Tripp. As if the name wasn’t bad enough…
Joe Max
When I had the choice, about five years ago, as to where to place my employer-matched retirement account, I chose the "Safe Haven" plan, which is basically putting it all in T-bills. There was something not right in the stars, thought I. I live in the Bay Area and clearly remembered the dot-com bust. Something about "irrational exuberance", I seemed to recall…
They all laughed at me, they did. "I’m making __% more on my account in the stock market! HA-ha!"
Now their accounts are in the crapper, and mine has lost: zero. In fact, I still got the paltry 2% interest last year.
Who’s the grasshopper NOW, eh? Eh?
David Hunt
Oh God, don’t even joke about stuff like that! I live smack in the middle of Texas and it’s 200+miles out in any direction. I’m too old to be dodging Humungus and his cannibals these days.
kay
@JenJen:
They were desperate for a new metric because the stock market proved…unreliable, and they can’t use, say, Gallup tracking, because it’s favorable.
To the online poll! If we can’t find data, we’ll make some!
Comrade Stuck
@Punchy:
As long as they pull themselves by their mitochondrial cell straps and pay their taxes on time, I’m in.
Stooleo
So maybe a history buff could answer this question for me. After the Hoover presidency, were the Republicans then, being as big as dickheads as they are now? Did they honorably, slink off knowing they had seriously fucked shit up?
dadanarchist
@geg6:
srsly. he also "apologized" to rush limbaugh thusly:
"I’m sorry Limbaugh called for harsh sentences for drug addicts while he was a drug addict. I’m also sorry that he’s bent on seeing America fail. And I’m sorry that Limbaugh is one sorry excuse for a human being."
JenJen
@kay: It’s freaking maddening! Let’s just post an online poll, get the nutters to link it, and use the data to prop up our theory that Obama is totally unpopular! We’ll keep trying until we get it right!
In other news, are Bristol and Levi gonna send my wedding present back?
Napoleon
@Stooleo:
I don’t think they really shifted gears until Wilke’s run for President, when they at least ditched isolationism.
calipygian
tinfoil
I actually think the push for SS privatization in the early part of the second term was part of a realization that there was going to be a no shit meltdown coming round the bend and the SS trust fund was needed to keep the rotten edifce of our financial system propped up.
/tinfoil
amorphous
@JenJen: cnn r vry srs librl media.
Joshua Norton
Hell no. Roosevelt had to fight a "conservative" supreme court that didn’t see anything wrong with the country and declared most of his programs "unconstitutional".
The rest of the Repug party went in to foaming apoplexy over "socialist" safety-net issues like Social Security and unemployment insurance. (still does).
Brachiator
@Stooleo:
Well, there was this:
The New York Times and other papers dismissed Butler’s accusations as a gigantic hoax.
In any event, the money interests kept kicking at FDR until world events shut them up for a while.
amorphous
@calipygian: This is some high quality tinfoil you’ve got there. Got to be at least 4N5 or so, right?
Ricky Bobby
I know! We’ll just have the oil revenues from Iraq pay for it all!
/thread
kay
@JenJen:
I didn’t send a gift. I thought that wedding was a poor decision, on their part. Not that I’m judging. They weren’t getting the "kay basket ‘o high-end housewares" though. I can’t endorse that sort of teenage madness. I have "gifting standards". Those two kids simply did not meet them.
I wish them both the best, in any future (solo) endeavors.
Palin had a two year battle in Family Court, with her former brother in law, and she wasn’t even a named party to that divorce. In my ample experience, there is a certain kind of person who engages in a two year family court battle in a divorce NOT HER OWN: a vindicative, lunatic person.
That boy dodged a bullet. The Palin’s litigate family disputes. Run, don’t walk, from people who do that.
TheHatOnMyCat
Americans would now be happy, jolly people. Free of the government telling them what to do with their money, and free to listen to Jim Cramer, they would now be destitute and foraging for food along the side of the road. Happily foraging, free of the chains of government.
Happy, free, jolly.
@TenguPhule:
Mmmm. Twins. Tasty!
JenJen
@kay: I was just kiddin’ about sending a gift. ;-)
Little Mr. "Sex On Skates" dodged a bullet, indeed. I’m reminded of one of my favorite campaign photo-ops; seems all the more ridiculous now!
Tiny Fey as Palin: "I believe marriage is meant to be a sacred institution between two unwilling teenagers." :-)
Comrade Darkness
@Brachiator,
It was never a "retirement plan" it was a tax. Just a tax, to fund a safety net because someone finally decided that watching the elderly rot in the gutter after starving to death on the side of the road wasn’t something a civilized country should be cold enough to tolerate. The people who set up this tax realized that the damn well better collect a bit ahead of the game because the number of retirees would balloon in the far future and there wouldn’t be enough money.
That’s the extent of it. The idiot noise machine that got us to that point is responsible for letting manipulative bastards rewrite reality like this. Calling it a retirement plan let them get leverage to f*ck the thing up. They should not have been allowed to reframe the issue unchallenged. Fortunately the AARP aren’t idiots and they got their membership riled up and that put the brakes on it.
As an aside, can you imagine us coming up with a program and looking ahead far enough to keep it functioning this long? Case in point, Medicare, which should have had the same setup.
dave
Punchy:
Manslaughter requires some degree of culpability (i.e. negligence or recklessness).
However, a miscarriage is certainly evidence of possible recklessness negligence or even deliberate murder.
Did the woman take an abortifacent.
Did she drink alcohol/smoke cigarettes/ use drugs/prescriptions/ etc in an effort to induce a miscarriage (homicide)
Every miscarriage under such a regime is a potential crime scene that must be investigated.
lovethebomb
@calipygian: This is not tinfoil at all. Repugs have always hated SS. Those who knew about CDO’s, credit default swaps, mortgage backed securities and other exotic financial instruments which bet on the housing market, realized the boom would eventually be followed by a bust. They knew the ponzi could only get so big before it collapsed. Eventually all those highly leveraged bets on those bad loans would break bad. I am not entirely uncertain that the trilateral commission/illuminati shadow govt/corporate owners did not game this out and did their best to get their puppet to toss SS into the lootbag.
Bob In Pacifica
My GPS reads "Shit Creek (without a paddle)."
Porlock Junior
@punchy:
In fact, it’s extremely simple. In Roe vs Wade the Supreme Court of the United States ruled explicitly that the existence of a fetus does not create a human being with Constitutional rights. That was the legal basis of the whole thing.
Pretty promptly, a few states — Ohio, I think, was the pioneer — noticed the big fat loophole that the Court had left: A fetus is a human being being with a full set of rights, and they had only to mention that in their law, and they could go back to outlawing abortion!
But, you say, that is exactly what the Supreme Court ruled was not legally valid? Well, yeah, but so what? We can pass a law and get some votes out of it.
That was back in the 70s of course. It didn’t work, of course, and extremely nasty-minded people might even suggest that there was no intention that it should work as a matter of law, but what do they know about the brainpower of Ohio legislators?
Now these assholes — not, AFAIK in Ohio, a state that’s mostly sane — have improved on it by decreeing that a zygote is a human being with legal rights, like to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This, of course, will stand up to scrutiny in actual courts in the United States about as well as the 70s laws did. Which is to say, there will be massive outpourings from the Whiny-Ass Tittty Babies about the evil courts taking away the Will of the People.
Porlock Junior
@stooleo:
It’s really kind of confusing. The most awful slanders circulated about FDR, of course. Sort of like Lincoln, or, you know, that guy who got elected in 2008. But the Republicans in Congress tended to cooperate, because the whole of the Responsible Population was scared shitless, and people who should know better were suggesting that the new President ought to have dictatorial powers to deal with the crisis.
On the day FDR took office, the entire banking industry was pretty well non-functioning, and going down from there!
Remember, it had been three years since the Crash, and once the election was over, no one took seriously what Hoover had been saying about the end of the Depression. Obama doesn’t have that advantage because of the chance of the timing of the election. Also because three years of inaction would have left nothing to save in our Modern Dynamic Internet-paced Economy.
Naturally people resumed being dickheads as soon as they could, but Republicans in the 30s tended to be conservatives who respected the traditions, not radicals who would threaten some Nuclear Option as soon as one of their own favorite tactics became temporarily inconvenient to them.