As if there were any doubt. But true believers of Keynesian economics have total faith in the top down, government-knows-best solution to economic woes despite its dismal track record.

“Yeah, I think we can say the stimulus was a bust,” Stephen Moore, a Wall Street Journal editorial board member and the newspaper’s senior economics writer, tells Newsmax. “The real problem is that the president has no plan B. We’ve had plan A, that was spend a trillion in stimulus. That didn’t work. We’ve lost 2.2 million jobs since we started that spending, and all the president wants to do is add more stimulus. That’s what’s so disappointing.”

Adding more spending will not help because it does not address the core problem. Government spending has never stimulated an economy out of recession or depression. They may use the rhetoric of “stimulus,” but it still amounts to nothing more than spending money they don’t have for a purpose it can’t accomplish. The bulk of the “stimulus” is nothing more than pork, adding trillions to the national debt, while crushing taxpayers for generations to come. The post-stimulus numbers are telling:

Friday’s Bureau of Labor Statistics report was a mixed bag. Unemployment dropped to 9.5 percent, but the dip was primarily because more people gave up looking for work. Although private employment rose, there was a 225,000 drop in jobs because of the loss of temporary census employment.

Perhaps most significantly, the private economy added 83,000 jobs - far below the projections of 115,000 to 125,000 jobs that many private analysts anticipated.

Some experts had estimated the economy would add up to 200,000 jobs. The disappointing numbers would be bad enough on their own, but instead they come in the context of a wealth of other indications that all is not well with the American economy.

Pending home sales took a record dive, with the National Association of Realtors’ index of new home sales falling by 30 percent. The index now stands 16 percent below its May 2009 level. Housing starts dropped as well.

New-vehicle sales are also stalling. In June, auto sales dropped 11 percent from May, although they are up 14 percent from June of 2009. The stock market has been heading downhill as well.

President Obama seems to be duplicating FDR’s failed policies in the hopes that somehow things will turn out differently. However, no entrepreneur or small business owner would take risks or expand a business in an anti-business climate. The following excerpt nicely summarizes the disaster of the New Deal and the similar path we are on (original article HERE):

Considering growth more broadly, it must be remembered that “recessions” and “depressions” are false notions. Thanks to our ravenous desire for the better things in life, we only know how to be productive and grow. In short, there’s no such thing as “economic” recessions or depressions. Instead, our productivity plummets when governments get in the way of our natural desire to produce. Recessions are always and everywhere authored by governments; they’re never economic.

Once this is understood, it’s easy to see why our economy struggles now, much as it did in the 1930s. When governments increase taxes and regulations, make it more difficult to trade, and devalue money, recessions and depressions are the frequent result. In that sense, President Obama may well oversee our lurch toward depression, but solely because he’s copying nearly every economic play from FDR’s failed 1930s playbook.

With taxes, FDR proclaimed that it was time for the “princes of property” to share more of their wealth, and the result was that he increased the top tax rate to 79 percent, lowered the threshold to reach it, plus increased the estate tax. President Obama similarly seeks to “spread the wealth around” with higher tax rates, and doesn’t seem troubled by nosebleed taxes on estates. FDR oversaw massive spending increases much like Obama, and spending is of course a tax on productivity like any other.

As for regulations, FDR foisted wage controls on the economy, strangled the nascent rise of the electricity industry with the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, plus he foisted an “undistributed profits tax” on all corporations which made job-creating expansion near impossible. Obama has already passed regulation of the health care industry, and is presently trying to do the same with the financial services and energy industries. FDR waged a war on business that only ended once he realized he couldn’t fight a war against commerce and in Europe at the same time. And if Business Roundtable CEO Ivan Seidenberg is to be believed, Obama’s war on business is happening in the here and now.

Concerning trade, FDR inherited the Smoot-Hawley tariff which put up barriers to the natural flow of goods, and worse, retarded the natural move toward individual economic specialization that fosters the very production that is wealth creation. Obama inherited and expanded on the very bailouts that the Bush administration foisted on the economy, and which are by definition protectionist for propping up businesses that should be allowed to fail, or be swallowed by domestic or foreign competitors. The shabby treatment of British Petroleum is yet another protectionist act which imperils U.S. multi-nationals, while chilling investment stateside. All that, plus Obama’s prostrate countenance toward unions means that any alleged free-trade pacts with foreign countries will be far from free, which points to more, not less in the way of the specialization so necessary for growth.

Considering the dollar, FDR oversaw a major decline of the greenback from 1/20th of an ounce of gold to 1/35th. Obama’s Treasury Secretary Geithner has achieved much the same, with the gold price having risen from roughly $750/ounce to $1,240/ounce. Currency devaluation is inflation, inflation is anti-investment, and there are no jobs without investment.

Roosevelt’s Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, admitted that: “We have tried spending money . . . it does not work . . . we have just as much unemployment . . . and an enormous debt to boot.”

Huge tax increases are also headed our way (not just cap and trade or health care) as Obama is “…intentionally red-lining the nation’s debt crisis to justify huge tax increases in the coming year. The Congressional Budget Office recently projected that the national debt will grow to 62 percent of the nation’s economic output by year’s end. Democrats have cited that grim news to call for higher taxes.”

No matter how poorly their theories turn out in practice, progressives cannot let reality modify their beliefs. The empirical evidence simply does not support their proposed solutions, yet they stubbornly refuse to change. Instead, they dogmatically cling to their ideas due to their emotional appeal. It’s a testimony to the power that ideas like Keynesianism or socialism can have over people, even if they are really bad ideas.