Congressman Austria Clearly Never Took An American History Class

Sadly, Steve Austria of Ohio sets the bar awfully low in order to get into Congress. You would hope that a person sent to represent hundreds of thousands of Americans might know something about the country's history, but not in Mr. Austria's case. You see, the Republican spin campaign against the stimulus has been in overdrive and that means bursts of revisionist history are bound to be seen all over the place. In this instance, the Congressman from Ohio tries to move the date of the Great Depression ahead by four years.

From The Columbus Dispatch:

U.S. Rep. Steve Austria said he supports a scaled-down federal economic-stimulus proposal, but the Beavercreek Republican told The Dispatch editorial board that the huge influx of money into the economy could have a negative effect.

"When (President Franklin) Roosevelt did this, he put our country into a Great Depression," Austria said. "He tried to borrow and spend, he tried to use the Keynesian approach, and our country ended up in a Great Depression. That's just history."

Um, no, that isn't history, that's your own deluded version of it. After a decade of Republican encouragement (see Presidents Coolidge, Harding and Hoover) of unregulated financial greed and land speculation, the stock market collapsed on October 29, 1929. The nation's GDP plummeted for the next four years, and only began to rebound when FDR started to spend money on the nation's (gasp) infrastructure to get it going again. This isn't fiction Mr. Austria, it is historical fact. Now I know you want to say that FDR failed to get us out of the Great Depression and that only WWII saved us, but that is pure myth.

The facts of the 1920s through the 40s are what they are and here in the first decade of the new millenium, they may not be the same but the similarities are apparent. Unregulated financial markets created unmitigated greed, blowing up a bubble in the housing market (among other sectors, such as the somewhat newly created Credit Default Swap market) and it was only a matter of time before it blew up in our faces. Now we have a giant Republican (and some Democrats who tried to emulate them) mess that Obama has to clean up. And trust me Mr. Austria, it won't be by trying to blow that bubble up again.