I was impressed by President Obama's speech the other night to the joint session of Congress but it turns out that the speech was merely a warm-up to his breath-taking budget. Barack Obama ran for office with a change agenda, and the budget reflects a real break with the past for the nation. A Bold Plan Sweeps Away Reagan Ideas was a headline in today's New York Times. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman observes in the same newspaper:
huge break, not just with the policies of the past eight years, but
with policy trends over the past 30 years. If he can get anything like
the plan he announced on Thursday through Congress, he will set America
on a fundamentally new course.
But it was the neo-conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer – our most eloquent torture apologist – who makes the correct argument in the Wasthington Post today that President Obama is moving the nation to more of a European-style social democracy:
so openly. And now we know what opportunity he wants to seize. Just as
the Depression created the political and psychological conditions for
Franklin Roosevelt's transformation of America from laissez-faireism to
the beginnings of the welfare state, the current crisis gives Obama the
political space to move the still (relatively) modest American welfare
state toward European-style social democracy.
For those who paid attention during the presidential campaign, Obama's social democratic orientation should not come as a surprise. After the speech in Berlin last July, Uwe-Karsten Heye discussed this in a conversation with Stern:
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Krugman’s a hard man to convince, and he’s on board now with Obama’s economic plans. This is very good news.