Obama, according to Wall Street people who regularly deal with his economic and budget officials, is acting as if he has a blank check to do what he wants, while ignoring the longterm costs of his policies.
When I was working on my book Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift, I read a work that Walter Lippmann, the co-founder of The New Republic, published in 1937. In it, with an eye to the New Deal, he observed that, while
the partisans who are now fighting for the mastery of the modern world wear shirts of different colors, their weapons are drawn from the same armory, their doctrines are variations of the same theme, and they go forth to battle singing the same tune with slightly different words. . . .
