Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard
You guys talking about FDR? Sounds like the same criticism he was getting circa 1933-1939.
And so it goes... 
Richard's $.02  |
Richard,
You mean like this
SnT
We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.”
Sound like, oh, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio or some other exasperated Republican stalwart lamenting proposals to spend our way out of the recession?
Listen again:
“I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises.”
Sound more like a liberal Democrat pushing job creation — say, Harlem’s Rep. Charlie Rangel?
What about this:
“I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. … And an enormous debt to boot!”Surely this must be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or another leading Democrat denouncing President Bush’s economic policies.
Wrong. Wrong. And wrong again.
The words are those of none other than
Henry Morgenthau Jr. — close friend, lunch companion, loyal
secretary of the Treasury to President Franklin D. Roosevelt — and key architect of FDR’s New Deal. The date: May 9, 1939. The setting: Morgenthau’s appearance in Washington before less influential Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee.
Morgenthau made this “startling confession,” as historian Burton W. Folsom Jr. calls it, during the seventh year of FDR’s New Deal programs to combat the rampant unemployment of the Great Depression.
“In these words, Morgenthau summarized a decade of disaster, especially during the years Roosevelt was in power. Indeed
average unemployment for the whole year in 1939 would be higher than that in 1931, the year before Roosevelt captured the presidency from Herbert Hoover,”
http://blog.heritage.org/2009/01/14/...t-doesnt-work/
Franklin Delanor Roosevelt is popularly regarded as the man who saved democratic capitalism with vigorous governmental intervention.
Contemporary Democrats view FDR’s New Deal as the Big Bang for all that is good and true and seek to build on it by extending the reach of government into the economy through increased regulation, new programs and higher taxes.
But a distinction must be drawn between FDR the brilliant politician who prepared the nation for World War II and kept Britain afloat after the defeat of France, and
FDR the economic illiterate.
Roosevelt’s opponents, and even his friends, referred to him as “featherduster” – a lightweight and a clever dig as his blueblood heritage. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. derided FDR as a “second-rate intellect but first-rate temperament.”
In the 1930s, the conventional wisdom was that capitalism had failed. FDR apparently never challenged that assumption.
But the failure of government – not the free market – created the Great Depression. The economic collapse could have been avoided.
On Oct. 19, 1987 – “Black Monday” – the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 508.32 points, or about 22.6%, and closed at 1,738.40.
The decline almost doubled the 12.8% loss in the 1929 crash. By mid-1988, the market had recovered and, in general, the U.S. economy had shrugged off the sharp downturn. In contrast, the U.S. economy nose-dived after the 1929 crash and didn’t revive until the nation rearmed to fight World War II.
The difference:
Quick action by the Federal Reserve.
The money supply dropped about 33% from 1929 to 1933, in large part due to the
Federal Reserve’s incompetence. Some economists argue that much of the pain inflicted by the Great Depression could have been avoided if Benjamin Strong, governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the de facto equivalent of today’s Fed chairman, hadn’t died prematurely in 1928.
http://www.minyanville.com/articles/.../index/a/15389
And now you know the "rest of the story"
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