HEY, BIG SPENDER

These are the times that try men's souls, all right. The new "patriots," ready for revolution, have put on their three-cornered hats and mounted up,

Ready to ride and spread the alarm/Through every Middlesex village and farm/For the country folk to be up and to arm.

They can't fathom or tolerate all this spending! So they repeat the hand-wringing cry of New Deal days: "Our children will be saddled with a crushing burden of debt that they will never get free of!" (The skittish are coming! The skittish are coming!)

Well, look. All the spending is occurring because nothing else is going to get us out of the depression - yes, 10% unemployment is what we call a depression - that the Bush administration got us into with its incontinent policies.

The righties say FDR's spending didn't cure the Great Depression. But if not for it, we'd have sunk to the bottom. Then you would have seen socialism. (It amuses me how the presidents who have done the most to avert socialism - FDR and Obama - are the ones accused of being socialists!)

What happened is that, as the economy righted itself, the New Dealers decided they had done the trick, and the government proceeded to cut back on the expenditures. The economy then sagged again. Much more spending was requisite but could no longer be undertaken.

Almost certainly the stimulus effort of the Obama administration has prevented a worsening economy with absolutely disastrous consequences. It has also addressed infrastructure and other long-term problems that required investment. It had to happen.

And all of us know that there is only one way we are going to bring down the staggering national debt. That is for the economy to ROAR as it did after WWII.

We must also take stringent reform measures to prevent a recurrence of what just happened.

I view the new economic upsurge with mixed feelings. This society is already so commercialized and so in thrall to the advertising industry that I hate to see that grow.

But it is not too soon to begin thinking about how to lay the groundwork for a healthier, less materialistic kind of society for the longer term. We, the people of the United States of America should be on that job now.