Say What?

From Ross Douhat's column today: "The central premise of the White House’s policy-making, the assumption that an economic crisis is a terrible thing to waste (as Rahm Emanuel famously put it), turned out to be a grave tactical mistake. It drew exactly the wrong lesson from earlier liberal eras, when the most enduring expansions of government — Social Security in the 1930s, Medicare in the 1960s — were achieved amid strong economic growth, rather than at the bottom of a recession."

Yep, you read that right. Social Security was passed amid strong economic growth, rather than at the bottom of a recession. This is appearing on the op-ed page of the Paper of Record.