Cato’s Chris Edwards offers his proposal for warding off depression: “What Obama should do is a pass a large corporate tax rate cut, which would spur long-run growth.” Yes, neo-Hooverism taken to new and exciting heights allowing everyone to dust off the Keynes line about how in the long-run we’re all dead in an appropriate context. Long-run growth is important, but it’s not going to be worth anything unless we get out of the downward spiral that’s facing us immediately.

Meanwhile, what we actually need is corporate tax reform — close loopholes, grow the tax base, and lower the tax rate.

As I documented, the right initially tended toward a neo-Hooverite line on the economic crisis. Then came a seeming shift and the emergence of a broad consensus in favor of strong action. Recently, though, there’s been a tilt back in the neo-Hooverite direction even as the crisis has grown more severe and along with it, increased blogospheric interest in what motivates neo-Hooverism. Steve Benen offered a five-fold categorization of motives:

1. The Moral Explanation: Ed Kilgore explains that some on the right thing America is too fate and happy. This is a bit like David Frum’s nineties vintage Donner Party conservatism.
2. The Benefactor Explanation: Matt Stoller says the right is more interested in entrenching inequality than worrying about the economy.
3. The Illiterate Explanation: Maybe they’re just dumb.
4. The Strategic Explanation: TPM Reader JF observes that a long depression serves the GOP’s political interests.

The obvious thing to say about this is that these explanations are mutually re-enforcing. In particular, the fact that a prolonged economic downturn serves the GOP’s political interests massively increases the grasp of the other factors. It’s one thing for a political party to buck the desires of its interest-group base or the ideological biases of its core supporters when doing so is necessary for the party’s political fortunes. But to buck those desires when doing so would be bad for the party’s electoral prospects is really asking a lot.

Beyond that, the emergence of age polarization in the electorate may play a role here. Elderly people, and especially the more prosperous group of elderly people, are actually reasonable well-positioned to weather a deflationary storm. By contrast, young people pay a huge lifelong economic price for graduating into a weak labor market or getting laid off after only a few years in the workforce.

Eric Rauchway reflects on Herbert Hoover’s October 25, 1929 proclamation that “The fundamental business of the country, that is the production and distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis.”

Hoover worked to get businessmen to respond to the crisis by herding them into conferences and urging them to cooperate. He backed immigration restriction and a cut in the capital-gains tax. He quarreled with the unemployment figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. None of it worked, and yet Hoover insisted on the soundness of fundamentals, blaming the continuing crisis on whiners: “The income of a large part of our people is not reduced by the depression,” he said, “but is affected by unnecessary fears and pessimism.” He urged his fellow countrymen to count on “the magnificent working of the Federal Reserve system and the inherently sound condition of the banks.”

But the banks were not inherently sound; they depended on the unsound foundation of 1920s lending. After the crash, the president said the fundamentals were strong, but American consumers said, in effect, well, we’ll see, and their credit-driven buying slowed. Purchases of consumer durables in 1930 were about 20 percent lower than they were in 1929. Less purchasing meant less selling and more layoffs, which meant still less purchasing and soon more defaulting. The banks began to fail. Meanwhile, the “magnificent working of the Federal Reserve” did not stop the bank failures, which increased to sickening levels as Hoover’s term ground on and the reality of the Depression became undeniable.

Now of course to actually get down to the depths of the Depression required some policy blunders that I think it’s extremely unlikely anyone in the contemporary United States will undertake. But there is an undeniable commonality to the off-the-shelf conservative policy prescriptions here.