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Contributed by Sam Minervino 2009-02-06

Portland — An incidental study of the causes of the great depression demonstrates President Obama is exacerbating the recession and pushing us towards economic disaster. His “buy America” comment which he has since retracted, threatened a trade war that would have destroyed American as well as foreign businesses. The so-called economic stimulus package does very little to create jobs and the few it does, are temporary and unproductive. In 2004, a study by two renowned UCLA economists, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian, showed “New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.” the article goes on to say;

“"Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump," said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA's Department of Economics.”We found that a relapse isn't likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies."- http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-Depression-5409.aspx?RelNum=5409

Obama is pushing hard for trade unions, a political pay back for the support they gave him during the presidential election. In 2006, only 12 percent of the American work force was unionized. In contrast to this, 36 percent of government employees are in unions. But unions artificially inflate wages and that is contrary to natural economic forces that would speed up economic recovery;

“High wages and high prices in an economic slump run contrary to everything we know about market forces in economic downturns," Ohanian said. "As we've seen in the past several years, salaries and prices fall when unemployment is high. By artificially inflating both, the New Deal policies short-circuited the market's self-correcting forces."- http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-Depression-5409.aspx?RelNum=5409

If you don’t believe it, just look at what the unions have done to the auto industry.

Rather than trying to micro-manage the economy into recovery, the opposite is true;

“…Robert E. Lucas Jr., the 1995 Nobel Laureate in economics, and the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago (wrote) "The prevention and cure of depressions is a central mission of macroeconomics, and if we can't understand what happened in the 1930s, how can we be sure it won't happen again?"- http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-Depression-5409.aspx?RelNum=5409

But just yesterday, Thursday, February 5th, President Obama said this;

“He (Obama) rejected the argument that more tax cuts are needed in the plan and that piecemeal measures would be sufficient.”- http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D965I5CG4&show_article=1

He clearly does not understand what happened in the 30’s and is attempting to take us down that same road or his agenda is contrary to what he claims it is.

Tax cuts are the surest way to stimulate the economy and yet the democrats in congress blocked a measure, with support from President Obama, to cut the taxes of Americans;

“The most sweeping proposal (for the stimulus bill), advanced by Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., would have eliminated all the spending and replaced it with a series of tax cuts. It was defeated 61-36.”- http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D965I5CG4&show_article=1

President Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanual, once said, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." Later, according to Worldnetdaily Emanuel “told business leaders assembled by the Wall Street Journal that the economic crisis facing the country is "an opportunity to do things you could not do before". Everything Obama is proposing; big government and vast spending just to mention two, are contrary to what would actually cause an economic recovery. Unless he is counting on this “crisis” to empower himself and advance socialism, he should heed the words of Cole and Ohanian;

"The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes," Cole said. "Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened."- http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-Depression-5409.aspx?RelNum=5409