President Bush imposed a so-called stimulus plan in 2008 and President Obama imposed an even bigger “stimulus” in 2009. Based upon the economy’s performance over the past five-plus years, those plans didn’t work.

Japan has spent the past 20-plus years imposing one Keynesian scheme after another, and the net effect is economic stagnation and record debt.

Going back further in time, Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt dramatically increased the burden of government spending, mostly financed with borrowing, and a recession became a Great Depression.

That’s not exactly a successful track record, but Paul Krugman thinks the evidence is on his side and that it’s time to declare victory for Keynesian economics.

Those of us who have spent years arguing against premature fiscal austerity have just had a good two weeks. Academic studies that supposedly justified austerity have lost credibility; hard-liners in the European Commission and elsewhere have softened their rhetoric. The tone of the conversation has definitely changed.

But Krugman doesn’t just want to declare victory. He also spikes the football and does a dance in the end zone.

I’m always right while the people who disagree with me are always wrong. And not just wrong, they’re often knaves or fools. …look at the results: again and again, people on the opposite side prove to have used bad logic, bad data, the wrong historical analogies, or all of the above. I’m Krugtron the Invincible!

So why does Krugman feel so confident about his position, notwithstanding the evidence? Veronique de Rugy has a concise and fair assessment of the Keynesian rationale. Simply stated, no matter how bad the results, the Keynesians think the economy would have been in even worse shape in the absence of supposed stimulus.

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I’ve explained on many occasions that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was bad news for the economy. The same can be said of Herbert Hoover’s policies, since he also expanded the burden of federal spending, raised tax rates, and increased government intervention.

So when I was specifically asked to take part in a symposium on Barack Obama, Franklin Roosevelt, and the New Deal, I quickly said yes.

I was asked to respond to this question: “Was that an FDR-Sized Stimulus?” Here’s some of what I wrote.

President Obama probably wants to be another FDR, and his policies share an ideological kinship with those that were imposed during the New Deal. But there’s really no comparing the 1930s and today. And that’s a good thing. As explained by Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, President Roosevelt’s policies are increasingly understood to have had a negative impact on the American economy. …[W]hat should have been a routine or even serious recession became the Great Depression.

In other words, my assessment is that Obama is a Mini-Me version of FDR, which is a lot better (or, to be more accurate, less worse) than the real thing.

To be sure, Obama wants higher tax rates, and he has expanded government control over the economy. And the main achievement of his first year was the so-called stimulus, which was based on the same Keynesian theory that a nation can become richer by switching money from one pocket to another. …Obama did get his health plan through Congress, but its costs, fortunately, pale in comparison to Social Security and its $30 trillion long-run deficit. And the Dodd-Frank bailout bill is peanuts compared to all the intervention of Roosevelt’s New Deal. In other words, Obama’s policies have nudged the nation in the wrong direction and slowed economic growth. FDR, by contrast, dramatically expanded the burden of government and managed to keep us in a depression for a decade. So thank goodness Barack Obama is no Franklin Roosevelt.

The last sentence of the excerpt is a perfect summary of my remarks. I think Obama’s policies have been bad for the economy, but he has done far less damage than FDR because his policy mistakes have been much smaller.

Moreover, Obama has never proposed anything as crazy as FDR’s “Economic Bill of Rights.” As I pointed out in my article, this “would have created a massive entitlement state—putting America on a path to becoming a failed European welfare state a couple of decades before European governments made the same mistake.”

On the other hand, subsequent presidents did create that massive entitlement state and Obama added another straw to the camel’s back with Obamacare. And he is rigidly opposed to the entitlement reforms that would save America from becoming another Greece. So maybe I didn’t give him enough credit for being as bad as FDR.

P.S.: Here’s some 1930s economic humor, and it still applies today.

P.P.S.: The symposium also features an excellent contribution from Professor Lee Ohanian of UCLA.

And from the left, it’s interesting to see that Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research basically agrees with me. But only in the sense that he also says Obama is a junior-sized version of FDR. Dean actually thinks Obama should have embraced his inner-FDR and wasted even more money on an even bigger so-called stimulus.

Remember back in 2009, when President Obama and his team told us that we needed to spend $800 billion on a so-called stimulus package?

The crowd in Washington was quite confident that Keynesian spending was going to save the day, even though similar efforts had failed for Hoover and Roosevelt in the 1930s, for Japan in the 1990s, and for Bush in 2008.

Nonetheless, we were assured that the stimulus was needed to keep unemployment from rising above 8 percent.

Well, that claim has turned out to be hollow. Not that we needed additional evidence, but the new numbers from the Labor Department re-confirm that the White House prediction was wildly inaccurate. The 8.2 percent unemployment rate is 2.5 percentage points above the administration’s prediction.

Defenders of the Obama administration sometimes respond by saying that the downturn was more serious than anyone predicted. That’s a legitimate point, so I don’t put too much blame on the White House for the initial spike in joblessness.

But I do blame them for the fact that the labor market has remained weak for such a long time. The chart below, which I generated this morning using the Minneapolis Fed’s interactive website, shows employment data for all the post-World War II recessions. The current business cycle is the red line. As you can see, some recessions were deeper in the beginning and some were milder. But the one thing that is unambiguous is that we’ve never had a jobs recovery as anemic as the one we’re experiencing now.

Job creation has been extraordinarily weak. Indeed, the current 8.2 percent unemployment rate understates the bad news because it doesn’t capture all the people who have given up and dropped out of the labor force.

By the way, I don’t think the so-called stimulus is the main cause of today’s poor employment data. Rather, the vast majority of that money was simply wasted.

Today’s weak job market is affected by factors such as the threat of higher taxes in 2013 (when the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are scheduled to expire), the costly impact of Obamacare, and the harsh regulatory environment. This cartoon shows, in an amusing fashion, the effect these policies have on entrepreneurs and investors.

Postscript: Click on this link if you want to compare Obamanomics and Reaganomics. The difference is astounding.

Post-postscript: The president will probably continue to blame “headwinds” for the dismal job numbers, so this cartoon is definitely worth sharing.

Post-post-postscript: Since I’m sharing cartoons, I can’t resist recycling this classic about Keynesian stimulus.