Bush's answer: War

Here is a clip from an Oliver Stone documentary about South America, set to open in June. It is from an interview Stone did with former Argentine President Nestor Kirchner, apparently in Jan 2009, because at the end he says of Bush that he has only six days left (in office).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl446mXonu0

Here is the gist of the exchange:

Kirchner: I said a solution to the problems right now, I told Bush, is a Marshall Plan. And he grew angry. He said the Marshall Plan is a crazy idea of the Democrats. He said the best way to revitalize the economy is war. And that the United States has grown stronger with war.

Stone: War, he said that?

Kirchner: He said that. Those were his exact words.

Stone: Is he suggesting that South America go to war?

Kirchner: Well, he was talking about the United States. "The Democrats had been wrong. All of the economic growth of the United States hs been encouraged by wars.' He said it very clearly.

I think Bush is conflating the Marshall Plan (helping Europe's post-war recovery) with FDR's New Deal (to get us out of the Depression). The Republicans really believe that FDR's New Deal made the Great Depression worse, and that we didn't recover until World War II boosted the economy. But historians agree that the New Deal had the economy on the road to recovery until Republicans in Congress insisted on cutting back on the stimulus spending -- whereupon it began to slip backwards. And then the war came along and saved us from the Republican mistake. But they leave out that important, interfering step in FDR's plan and the result of his listening to them.

That is a typical Republican ploy: if you can't outright kill a social network program by abolishing it, you just underfund it, put incompetent people in charge, and watch it die.

There is no doubt that war stimulates the economy. We have to build lots of planes and bombs and stuff, and we have to hire lots of young folks to go fight. So like any government spending stimulus, it creates jobs. The key is jobs, not war. What they don't explain is why war jobs are better than jobs building roads, fixing bridges, teaching school, creating projects for artists and writers, etc. as the New Deal did.

With the New Deal kind of stimulus, you have things that last and benefit the people. With war spending stimulus, you spend the money on things that get blown up or shot down; soldiers get killed, and you have lots of wounded veterans to take care of. That doesn't happen in a peace economic boost.

Ralph