Historical Fallacy

What bothers me most in a lot of articles is the broad brush an author will write with when setting up their main point.  It's a natural tendency, one that I've succumbed to previously.

I came across this Forbes article on Why Obama is Hoover, Not Roosevelt and I thought "Wow, I've been thinking that all along."

But a few paragraphs in I came across this line:

Yes, it’s true that philosophically Hoover and Romney would both countenance less government intervention rather than more, and Roosevelt and Obama would raise tax rates and redistribute money from the top income earners to those below.  On the issues, Republicans still think like Republicans and vice versa.

Hoover actually meddled quite a bit an enacted one of the largest tax increases in American history.  This obviously caused the recession to continue on.  FDR's policies didn't help growth all that much either - if the war hadn't happened who knows how long FDR might have stayed in office and the recession continued.

To simply say "Republicans are against taxes" is inane.  I've found that far from being against taxes they try to find the right mix of taxes of entitlements as opposed to just handing out entitlements and thinking that you can tax the rich enough to pay for them.  We are well past that point - our entitlements are growing faster than our economy and most of them stand to go bankrupt in the next 5 to 20 years.

I don't care which party gets credit for entitlement reform but having worked with actuaries and done pension administration, it's pretty clear we can't keep going at this pace.  I just wish somebody on the D side of the aisle would acknowledge it and come up with a better plan than increase taxes by US$20 billion to pay for an additional US$5 trillion in spending.