A man who has made his career watching financial markets, CNBC's Charlie Gasparino, says that even Obama supporters on Wall Street are beginning to criticize his early efforts as being counter-productive. If you read the comments section after the article, you'll find very little sympathy for the folks on Wall Street who are widely believed to be the people responsible for our current troubles. This is why President Obama will maintain a solid level of public support for some time to come. That support will wane, however, when his programs fail to generate the economic growth his budget forecast predicts. A year from now, when we are still mired in the recession, when unemployment is still high, when taxes and budget deficits are higher, the Wall Street complainers will have lots more company (if not more sympathy).

Christopher Buckley, who supported President Obama, is also worrying about those deficits and the economic growth projections in Obama's budget.

Dick Morris and Eileen McGann point out that one of the more damaging aspects of the Obama policies is the plan to raise taxes on "the rich", that is, those people who make $250,000 a year or more. Last I checked, I've never been employed by someone who made less than that. So, to help economic growth, we're going to raise the expenses of everyone who creates jobs (except, of course, government jobs). Well, if I'm right, it won't work. If I'm wrong, then it's Socialism, now and forever.

In a more general commentary on our times, Richard Cohen points out that history has made a comeback, which will be difficult for our young people to grasp. I've been thinking along the same lines a lot lately. From the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 to the beginning of World War I in August, 1914, the people of Europe (and they were the dominant political and economic force in the world at the time) thought they had ended "history". No more wars (the wars against the natives of Africa and Asia waged by European Imperial powers didn't count), no great economic, social or religious upheavals, rising prosperity, improved technologies and medicines, and so on. They all knew that a war would eventually break out between some or all of the Great Powers, but they thought it would be short, if violent, and the world they knew would simply pick up and move on. An observer in one of the great European capitals in the Summer of 1914 would never have guessed that four years later much of Europe would be financially prostrate, parts of France would look like the surface of the moon, millions would be dead, the royal houses of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia (as well as several other smaller states) would be in exile or dead, that ideologies which would seek to sweep away the old political, social and religious systems would be loose upon the land. No, if you told them the future they would have cast you aside as a raving madman. Cohen's piece speaks to that period, and rightly points out that history is now roaring back in our own time. Can this recession become a depression? Can the recent economic upheaval lead to war? Can new, and terrifying, ideologies be born in the tumult that results? Yes, it can.