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COPYRIGHT 2008 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
When President Bush signed into law last week a fiscal stimulus package of income-tax rebates and business tax breaks, it was the first good news for American consumers in a while. The plan will give many families a twelve-hundred-dollar windfall, and it comes with a message Americans always like to hear: we can spend our way to prosperity. Turning those checks into new televisions and T-bones, the argument goes, will keep recession away.
This is a familiar and popular idea--politicians on both sides of the aisle praised the plan--but it once seemed like heresy. In 1932, with America suffering through the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt, the Democratic candidate for President, attacked President Herbert Hoover for spending too much trying to fight the downturn. Hoover, he charged, was recklessly running up the deficit and driving the country...
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