For the opposing opinion on this issue, read Ryan Swain’s Feb. 20 article, History invalidates bailout plan.

President Obama’s stimulus plan has united the Republican Party in anger, from Sean Hannity’s hilariously apocalyptic vision to Rush Limbaugh’s hope for failure.

Behind all the self-righteous chatter, conservatives are struggling to find legitimacy. They realize they are in no position to lecture about bloated expenditures. I believe it is safe to say replacing a $559 billion surplus with trillions of dollars in new debt is more deserving of the ?waste? label than Obama’s ongoing efforts. We will be paying for the Republicans’ eight-year-long shopping spree for decades.

Also, the frequent claim that Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s New Deal merely prolonged the Great Depression gives a woefully incomplete picture. As Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman has argued, that recession lasted for so long ?in spite of the Fed’s efforts, not because of them … the Fed tried to revive the economy with low interest rates. But even rates barely above zero weren’t low enough.?

Republicans can claim those efforts failed as many times as they want, but that never changes the truth about the Depression’s longevity: Roosevelt never went far enough.

Along with their attacks on 1930s policy, critics of the stimulus plan cite the supreme deity in the conservative pantheon: Ronald Reagan. His tax cuts supposedly brought the nation out of Jimmy Carter’s economic disaster, after all. Forgotten is the astronomical increase in debt during those years, mostly the result of spending on the military as if we were in total war, while at the same time starving the government of funds.

Another fact inconvenient to the opposition is the Gipper’s worsening of the economic downturn. Very early in his presidency, interest rates were raised to enormous levels. Only after the rates dropped did the economy recover.

Perhaps it is time Americans abandon the view that Reagan’s policies did only good for our economy and see them for what they were: libertarian fantasies bearing a striking resemblance to the ideas that brought about our current crisis.

In short, the conservative opposition to President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan has gone beyond ridiculous. It has gone beyond hypocritical. And, ultimately, it has gone beyond the limits of what merits attention.

Pay no attention to the nay-sayers and give this new era of Big Government a good welcome.