REAGAN VERSUS OBAMA: IS GOVERNMENT THE PROBLEM OR THE SOLUTION?

OBAMA - FIRST PRESS CONFERENCE AS PRESIDENT

President Obama said Monday that "only government" can shake the country out of recession, as he tried to settle doubts about his administration's costly economic recovery package during a prime-time press conference.

Obama painted a bleak picture of the state of the economy as he described scenes "across America" in which job-seekers are standing in long lines for scarce opportunities at employment.

He pointed to such scenes as proof the country is in a "full-blown crisis" and needs a drastic government response.

The president warned that a failure to act could "turn a crisis into a catastrophe," and urged lawmakers to get a bill to his desk without delay.

"It is absolutely true that we can't depend on government alone to create jobs or economic growth," he said.

"But at this particular moment, with the private sector so weakened by this recession, the federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back into life.

It is only government that can break the vicious cycle where lost jobs lead to people spending less money which leads to even more layoffs."

REAGAN - FIRST INAUGURAL:

These United States are confronted with an economic affliction of great proportions.

We suffer from the longest and one of the worst sustained inflations in our national history.

It distorts our economic decisions, penalizes thrift, and crushes the struggling young and the fixed-income elderly alike. It threatens to shatter the lives of millions of our people. Idle industries have cast workers into unemployment, human misery, and personal indignity.

Those who do work are denied a fair return for their labor by a tax system which penalizes successful achievement and keeps us from maintaining full productivity.

But great as our tax burden is, it has not kept pace with public spending.

For decades we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children's future for the temporary convenience of the present.

To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals.

You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time.

Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we're not bound by that same limitation?

We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow. And let there be no misunderstanding: We are going to begin to act, beginning today.

The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away. They will go away because we as Americans have the capacity now, as we've had in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom.

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.

REAGAN WAS RIGHT THEN, AND NOW.

OBAMA IS WRONG. SOCIALISM IS THE ROAD TO SERFDOM - ALWAYS HAS BEEN AND ALWAYS WILL BE.

UNDER OBAMA, IT APPEARS THE USA IS REAPEATING THE ERRORS OF CLEMENT ATLEE, ET AL.

SIGH.

WE NEED ANOTHER REAGAN - OR THATCHER. NOW.