-----The cruel irony of the New
Deal is that the liberals’ honorable intentions to help the poor and the
unemployed caused more human suffering than any other set of ideas in
the past century....until now anyway!
Repost from the THE DAILY SIGNAL
The Real Story About What Ended the Great Depression (Hint: It Wasn’t the New Deal)
Stephen Moore / September 28, 2014
My
seventh-grade son recently wrote a U.S. History paper extolling the
virtues of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. “It ended the Great
Depression,” he wrote with great certainty. He’s only 12 and parroting
what the history texts and his teachers told him.
That’s his excuse. What’s Ken Burns’?
Mr.
Burns’ docudrama on the Roosevelts—for those who weren’t bored to
tears—repeats nearly all the worn-out fairy tales of the FDR presidency,
including what I call the most enduring myth of the 20th century, which
is that FDR’s avalanche of alphabet-soup government programs ended the
Great Depression. Shouldn’t there be a statute of limitations on such
lies?
Ask nearly anyone over the age of 80, and they will say
that FDR cared about the working man and “gave the country hope,” a
point that Mr. Burns emphasizes. Roosevelt exuded empathy, which isn’t a
bad thing—remember Bill Clinton’s memorable line “I feel your
pain”?—but caring doesn’t create jobs or lift gross domestic product.
Nor
does spending government money revive growth, despite the theories put
into practice by the then-dean of all economists, John Maynard Keynes.
Any objective analysis of these facts can lead to no other conclusion.
U.S. unemployment averaged a rate of 18 percent during Roosevelt’s first
eight years in office. In the decade of the 1930s, U.S. industrial
production and national income fell by about almost one-third. In 1940,
after year eight years of the New Deal, unemployment was still averaged a
god-awful 14 percent.
Think of it this way. The unemployment
rate was more than twice as high eight years into the New Deal than it
is today, and American workers now are angry as hornets. Imagine, if
jobs were twice as scarce today, the pitchforked revolt that would be
going on. This is success?
Almost everything FDR did to
jump-start growth retarded it. The rise in the minimum wage kept
unemployment intolerably high. (Are you listening, Nancy Pelosi?)
Roosevelt’s work programs like the Works Progress Administration,
National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment
Administration were so bureaucratic as to have minimal impact on jobs.
Raising tax rates to nearly 80 percent on the rich stalled the economy.
Social Security is and always was from the start a Madoff-style Ponzi
scheme that will eventually sink into bankruptcy unless reformed.
The
most alarming story of economic ignorance surrounding this New Deal era
was the tax increases while the economy was faltering. According to
economist Burt Folsom, FDR signed one of the most financially
devastating taxes: “On April 27, 1942, he signed an executive order
taxing all personal income above $25,000 [rich back then] at 100
percent. Congress balked at that idea and later lowered it to 90 percent
at the top level.” The New Dealers completely ignored the lessons of
the 1920s tax cuts, which just a decade before had unfurled an age of
super-growth.
Then there was the spending and debt barrage.
Federal spending catapulted from $4.65 billion in 1933 to nearly $13.7
billion in 1941. This tripling of the federal budget in just eight years
came at a time of almost no inflation (just 13.1 percent cumulative
during that period). Budget surpluses during the prosperous Coolidge
years became ever-larger deficits under FDR’s fiscal reign. During his
first term, more than half the federal budget on average came from
borrowed money.
The cruel irony of the New Deal is that the
liberals’ honorable intentions to help the poor and the unemployed
caused more human suffering than any other set of ideas in the past
century.
What is maddening is that thanks to this historical
fabrication of FDR’s presidency, dutifully repeated by Mr. Burns, we
have repeated the mistakes again and again. Had the history books been
properly written, it’s quite possible we would never had to endure the
catastrophic failure of Obamanomics and the “stimulus plans” that only
stimulated debt. The entire rationale for the Obama economic plan in
2009 was to re-create new New Deal.
Doubly amazing is that at
this very moment, the left is writing another fabricated history — of
the years we have just lived through. The history books are already
painting Obama policies as the just-in-time emergency policies that
prevented a Second Great Depression. I wonder if 80 years from now, the
American people will be as gullible as they are today in believing, as
my 12-year-old does, that FDR was an economic savior.
Originally appeared in The Washington Times
Answer to "What Ended the Great Depression?" for the dumb masses out there is.....WORLD WAR II.
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