Say, How's that New New Deal Working Out?

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“FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate,” the UCLA Newsroom noted in a press release back in 2004. Three years later, Amity Shlaes would explore the human cost of America’s lost decade of the 1930s in her best-seller, The Forgotten Man. The following year, if only to continue punishing the ghost of moderate Republican founder Henry Luce, (who loathed FDR), Time magazine Photoshopped the then-newly-minted President-elect Barack Obama into the reincarnation of Franklin Roosevelt for its November 24, 2008 cover, whose headline read, “The New, New Deal:”

time_obama_fdr_12-24-2008-3

Curiously, Time meant both the image and the headline as compliments to the 44th president to be. So how’s that New, New Deal working out these days? As financial writer Matthew C. Klein noted yesterday at Bloomberg.com (which ever since, oh, about November 24, 2008, has been the home of the “unexpectedly” bad US economic news), America “is on track for a lost decade under the most optimistic assumptions.” Klein’s article is titled, “Don’t Get Too Excited About Today’s Jobs Data.”

Thanks for the advice, though I really hadn’t planned to, actually. Particularly since, as Wes Pruden noted yesterday in the Washington Times, ObamaCare is shaping up to be “The Fiasco of the Ages:”

The best the Democrats can say about Obamacare is that it’s an approaching train wreck, in the memorable description of Sen. Max Baucus of Montana. Mr. Baucus was one of the authors of the legislation and now he’s hurrying home to Montana for good, anxious to avert his eyes from all the hair, teeth and eyeballs soon to be scattered along the railroad right-of-way.

Pundits and professors are rifling through the thesaurus, looking for the right word to describe what the Wall Street Journal calls “a fiasco for the ages.” The Journal editorialists reminded everyone that they “fought the Affordable Care Act from start to passage, and we’d like to apologize to our readers. It turns out we weren’t nearly critical enough.”

The editors of The New York Times, Mr. Obama’s most reliable sycophants, are deep in mourning, but working furiously to apply more rouge to the corpse before it turns the parlor too fragrant for a wake. It’s summer, and they’re running out of ice.

The “downside” to the delay in implementing the employer mandate is that it gives Republican critics the facts and figures, the “ammunition to portray the health care reforms as a failure,” The Times says. But not to worry, the year’s delay decreed by the president will allow the Internal Revenue Service time to figure out “how this mandate will work … it is more important to do this right than to do it quickly.”

Gee, if only somebody had thought of that in 2010. Or perhaps in 2008, come to think of it.

Update: “Obamacare Strikes: Part-Time Jobs Surge To All Time High; Full-Time Jobs Plunge By 240,000,” the Zero Hedge econo-blog notes. Or as Iowahawk tweeted yesterday: