The Difference Between Nixon and Obama
Just so no one brands me a racist for calling Obama an incompetent, lying, cheating, calculating, election-rigging President, I personally believe that Nixon was also an incompetent, lying, cheating, calculating, election-rigging President. One year before the 1972 Presidential election, to help his chances of being re-elected, Nixon instituted wage-price controls in an attempt to rein in inflation and runaway wages and prices; any increases in wages or prices would need the approval of a "Price Commission," and which controls would eventually, and conveniently, be lifted after the 1972 election much like the Obamacare's Employer Mandate will conveniently kick in after the 2014 elections.
The wage-price controls were an abysmal failure (much like the ACA is a failure) in holding back inflation (it rose to 12 percent) and caused business disruptions that led to even higher unemployment rates (much like the ACA is doing and will do), but the failure wasn't felt until after Nixon was re-elected. The failure became obvious when, Soviet-style, American ranchers refused to ship cattle to market or when farmers drowned their chickens because they couldn't get the price they wanted for their products.
Nixon was very much like Obama: interfering in economic matters for political gain rather than for consumers' best interests and expanding government regulation (1) like no one since F.D.R. and surpassed only by the Obamessiah.
Just so my readers know, I am not saying bad things about Nixon just for the purpose of this article: I believed his war on drugs was futile and counter-productive and said so in my article Drugs and the Never-ending War.
Likewise, in my article I almost Had Sex at Six, I reported that it was Richard Nixon who invented the idea of Hispanics as a ploy to bring Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Salvadorans, Panamanians, Nicaraguans and Guatemalans into the Republican fold much as Obama pandered to the Hispanic community when in 2012 the White House announced that the administration would stop deporting young illegal aliens.
So in many of these regards, the administrations of Nixon and Obama have many similarities; however Nixon could not walk on water, see the photo above and my article Open Wide For the Obamessiah.
ENDNOTES
(1):
on PBS, Nixon, Price Controls, and the Gold Standard
In retrospect, some would call the Nixon presidency the "last liberal administration." This was not only because of the imposition of economic controls. It also carried out a great expansion of regulation into new areas, launching affirmative action and establishing the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. "Probably more new regulation was imposed on the economy during the Nixon administration than in any other presidency since the New Deal," Herbert Stein ruefully observed.
