Sunday, February 1, 2009

Calvin Coolidge and John Boehner's House of Representatives.

"Calvin Coolidge would feel reasonably comfortable and right at home in John Boehner's House of Representatives. That's the philosophical distance the GOP has traveled."  So said P.M.Carpenter in an Op-Ed yesterday.  I am always attracted to oddly twinned comparisons such as this one, which is why I bring it to your attention. Calvin Coolidge, he said.  And John Boehner.  

Some of Mr. Coolidge's more famous quotes:

• When a great many people are unable to find work, unemployment results. 

• We draw our Presidents from the people. It is a wholesome thing for them to return to the people. I came from them. I wish to be one of them again. 

• We do not need more intellectual power, we need more spiritual power. We do not need more of the things that are seen, we need more of the things that are unseen

• The man who builds a factory builds a temple, that the man who works there worships there, and to each is due, not scorn and blame, but reverence and praise. 

One of the biographies of this President is titled, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge   Quite the interesting comparison. Another biographer wrote, "Then there's the blame. Coolidge's 'brand of economics' would be widely discredited, faulted for the disasters that followed"—i.e., the Great Depression. Coolidge is judged economically shortsighted. His "naive faith in the gospel of productivity and the benevolence of business...deterred him from even asking the questions that might have mitigated the misfortune." 

One of the criticisms of Coolidge was that of  not taking action to prevent the build up of credit and speculation in the stock market. All indications are there that he should have limited money at some point, but Coolidge let the market make its own correction  Where and when have we heard that kind of president before?

P.M. Carpenter's point is that today's Republican party, under Boehner and Mitchell, are still harping the economics of Coolidge as well as the old 'less government, less regulations, trickle-down' that in fact, has brought this nation to its knees.  Are the American citizens bright enough to see this or will they fall, once again, for the GOP bamboozlement once more?


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