Democrats see the road to economic recovery, and it has been bulldozed, flattened out by a road grader and covered with pavement.

Barack Obama says a fiscal stimulus will be the top priority of his administration. The initial offer is $500 billion, 4 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. It will include billions for construction projects as the country tries to claw its way back to economic growth one road, flyover and bridge at a time.

Democrats are enjoying a New Deal reverie wherein a Democratic president solves an economic crisis with public-works projects. The new issue of Time magazine features Obama on the cover decked out in the trappings of FDR. This image would accurately capture the moment, (1) if Obama - president-elect for all of two weeks - had actually accomplished something, and (2) if Franklin Roosevelt's economic program had really ended the Great Depression.

Neither is true. As Amity Shlaes documents in her book "The Forgotten Man," the economy limped along under FDR's stewardship in the 1930s. Many of the era's public-works projects were undertaken for political reasons as well as economic ones. Government crowded out private initiative and neglected policies to promote the private sector. Net private investment declined at times during the 1930s.