Meet The New Boss, Same As The Old Boss

Is it just us or is the American response to the “global financial crisis” starting to sound a lot like that song by The Who?

You know, the one about tipping our hats to the new constitution, taking a bow for the new revolution, smiling and grinning at all the change around us … but then getting on our knees and praying “we don’t get fooled again.”

In fact, here’s a particularly timely (and prescient) quote from the song we think sums up the status of our country at the moment …

The change, it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the foe, that’s all
And the world looks just the same
And history ain’t changed
‘Cause the banners, they all flown in the last war …

Change we can believe in? More like more of the same.

Wait, we know what you’re thinking … there couldn’t be two Presidents more diametrically opposite (and opposed) than the current outgoing and incoming Chief Executives.

First we have a bumbling, intellectually incurious wanna-be rancher who leaves office as one of the most despised Presidents ever.

In short … movies have already been made about what an idiot this guy is.

Taking his place is a smooth-talking “thinker,” America’s first biracial president and a guy who spent $639 million building an unprecedented political cult of personality that has him walking into Washington on water.

In short … schools have already been named for this guy, and he hasn’t even taken his oath of office yet.

Of course, the sad reality is that these two men aren’t as different as they appear.

As far as fiscal issues are concerned, anyway, there’s hardly a nickel’s worth of difference between outgoing President George W. Bush and incoming President Barack Obama.

Both supported the massive $700 billion federal bailout (which hasn’t worked), and both supported blowing another $1.5 trillion into select financial entities and related investments, none of which has stopped the bleeding.

Bush, quite simply, looked at a market going to hell in a handbasket and decided to say to hell with capitalism, let’s blow billions bailing out the same people who got us into this mess in the first place.

And now Obama – whose party planted the seeds of the disaster – has decided to say to hell with capitalism some more.

From the Washington Post:

Facing an increasingly ominous economic outlook, President-elect Barack Obama and other Democrats are rapidly ratcheting up plans for a massive fiscal stimulus program that could total as much as $700 billion over the next two years.

That amount, more than the nation has spent over the past six years in Iraq, would rival the sum Congress committed last month to rescuing the country’s financial system. It would also be one of the biggest public spending programs aimed at jolting the economy since President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

So to recap, when faced with a “once in a lifetime economic crisis,” President George W. Bush’s solution was to propose the single largest government interventions in the free market economy since the New Deal.

And now that this approach clearly hasn’t worked, President-elect Barack Obama’s solution is to … you guessed it … propose the single largest government intervention in the free market economy since the New Deal.

Meet the new boss, people … same as the old boss.

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