Ghost Stories

Democrats lately have invoked the ghost of Herbert Hoover several times in their quest to regain control of the White House.  So much so that it inspired the Wall Street Journal to examine the economic policies of Herbert Hoover and compare them to the policies that Democrats are proposing today.  

Here is an excerpt from the article:

By last week, Mrs. Clinton was in full Ghostbusters mode, claiming that John McCain’s speech on the housing problem “sounds remarkably like Herbert Hoover, and I don’t think that’s good economic policy.”

No, Senator, it surely isn’t. Around our offices, we’re still recovering from the fact that Hoover was the last Presidential candidate we’ve endorsed. We’ve been trashing Hoovernomics ever since. The issue this year, however, is who is really pursuing the Hoover model.

To hear Mr. Schumer and his fellow-traveling columnists tell it, Hoover’s great policy blunder was to do nothing, all the while insisting that everything was fine. But the problem with Hoover’s economic policy isn’t that it was passive but that it was actively destructive.

In 1930, he signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, setting off a wave of protectionist retaliation that undid the globalization of the preceding decades and did far more harm to the world economy than the stock-market crash ever did. Two years later, amid a bad recession, he undid the Calvin Coolidge-Andrew Mellon tax cuts, raising the top marginal income-tax rate to 63% from 25%. The recession became a Depression.

Two of the three Candidates desiring to fill out change of address cards in January have Hoover like economic policies that feature protectionism and tax hikes.  Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama.  If either of those two make it to the Oval Office as anything other than guests of a President John McCain we may need the number to Ghost Busters…