Is that Barack Obama or Herbert Hoover?

"... mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again ..."

Barack Obama is sounding more and more like Herbert Hoover, according to one of the nation's leading business newspapers, Investor's Business Daily.

The Obama campaign is using Wall Street's woes as a new rationale for its massive tax increases and protectionism. The last president to take that approach helped cause the Great Depression, the newspaper says in an editorial.

From the IBD editorial:

Not unlike Bill Clinton campaigning in 1992, Sen. Obama promises a middle-class tax cut at the expense of the rich.

But it was less than a month after his inauguration in 1993 that President Clinton, intent on so much new government "investment," gave a televised Oval Office address to the nation announcing that instead of a middle-class tax cut there would be a middle-class tax hike, "because the deficit has increased so much beyond my earlier estimates."

With Clinton expenditure plans in the 1992 campaign dwarfed now by Obama's — Obama would add more than $343 billion in annual spending according to the National Taxpayers Union — his vows of middle-class tax cuts should be scrutinized carefully.

Hoover more than doubled the top marginal income tax rate and signed into law the Smoot-Hawley act, raising tariffs to record levels the summer after the 1929 stock market crash.

Massive new taxes and the abandonment of global economic freedom sold as "patriotism" is not only an outrage; it's a huge danger to an economy that has enough troubles already.

Read the full editorial, "Obama Dusts Off Hoover Playbook," at the newspaper's Web site.