You say the New Deal didn't work? Prove it

[bridgit]

'You love certainty.

Even when it turns out to be wrong, most of us love the sound of a voice speaking with inspired conviction.

Which brings me to a bit of bombast one hears over and over from the usual suspects--Rush Limbaugh, George Will, Charles Krauthammer and others who declare that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal didn’t end the Great Depression. World War II ended the Great Depression, they cry in harmony, and so we shouldn’t buy into President Obama’s stimulus spending plan.

If you set aside the historical truth that unemployment declined nearly every year of Roosevelt’s administration, this argument makes a certain sense to dewy-eyed children growing up among Republicans, because WWII changed damn near everything. It was a conflagration--outrageous chaos melded to unprecedented technology—and it swept Hitler off the world stage.


As a by-product, so the theory goes, it birthed the greatest economic juggernaut the world has ever seen, the U.S. post-war economy. So, the New Deal was beside the point, the argument runs, and one should resist Obama’s massive spending program, which is nothing but warmed over New Deal socialism they inform us with condescension dripping.

In order to spot the central fallacy of this argument, however, one need only play throw-and-catch with the following common sense question:

What in heck was WWII if not a massive government spending and employment program married to unparalleled protectionism?

Yes, yes, it was a war against Nazi-ism and so on, but when it comes to the key question of its effect on the U.S. and global economy, the U.S. war effort was the last word in Keynesian economics, government spending and protectionism—socialism if you will—long as we’re bandying about that hot-button word.

Honest, what was World War II if not the ultimate jobs-programs? Hundreds of thousands of American men were drafted into the military, and Rosie the Riveter’s job at the airplane factory was funded by fat government contracts paid for by tax dollars and federal deficits.

Face it. Nothing is more socialistic than the military culture, where you have men and women living in government housing, driving government jeeps, tanks, planes and boats, shooting government guns, eating government food, wearing government clothing and partaking of government healthcare. Everyone’s pay falls within well-defined boundaries, so the staggering inequities in pay—the kind dragged into the light by so many Wall Street scandals--scarcely exist in the military.'

http://www.opednews.com/articles/You-say-the-New-Deal-didn-by-Don-Williams-090401-124.html

[chrisa]

1. Asking the FDR revisionist crowd to prove anything,,,

is a lost cause.

[mix]

2. think of it this way

without the New Deal we would not have won WWII--full stop

[bridgit]

4. full stop!

[fascisthunter]

3. the right just makes shit up to deceive and filibuster any real dialogue

their motive... to shut down communication and replace it with myth... a myth that is advantageous to their right wing facist agenda.

[Captain Hilts]

5. Them's fightin' words!

FDR: You get 'em high and I'll get 'em low Old Girl!
ER: Okay, here goes...

[gulfcoastliberal]

6. K&R C'mon, we all know the friedman acolytes are completely divorced from reality.

Despite catastrophic failure after catastrophic failure, they continue acting like his ideas work.

[Lyric]

7. The American people (via Congress) weren't interested for a long time in a "war against Hitler."

So anyone trying to claim that we fought WWII out of the goodness of our noble hearts is full of shit. We didn't even stop selling oil and other supplies to the Axis Powers until Japan invaded China. We didn't bother ourselves with actually going to war until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in an attempt to cripple our Pacific Fleet and keep us from interrupting their oil supply from their SE Asian conquests.

Roosevelt WANTED to fight Hitler; he did everything he could to help Britain's war effort without actually sending over troops. But the American People wouldn't let him go that far--at least not until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. THEN the American People were cool with us getting into the War--out of revenge and hurt pride, not nobility of spirit.

The individual soldiers were heroes, and THEY fought for noble reasons. Their government (with the exception of President Roosevelt) and the me-first, isolationist sheeple who elected said government?...not so much.

Roosevelt was a great man--a true Statesman--who made his share of mistakes, but never backed down from a challenge. He did what he could, given the restrictions that he had. It's to our national shame that so many innocents died because our Congress members and the people who elected them were too damned self-concerned to be bothered with what the Axis Powers were doing until somebody dropped some torpedoes in THEIR backyard. If we'd have mobilized for war and gone to bat for Britain, Poland, and France right from the beginning, millions of lives could have been saved.

The truth is that right-wingers, who carry on this me-first mindset even today, are dead wrong. Roosevelt saved us from what could have been a thousand times worse--both with the New Deal, and with his speedy mobilization of factories and troops as soon as he got the go-ahead to enter WWII. If we had stayed with right-wing ideology then, half the world might still be in Axis Power hands and America would still be an economically-polarized nightmare of uber-rich and starving-poor.

[bridgit]

8. That's the way Americans can be, like Chris Rock says to cheering crowds...

He's not going to worry about a damn thing till he sees Russian tanks rolling up Flatbush Ave; till then it's malted milks, hip hop, bobby socks, taking profits out of Wall Street before they maturate and American Graffiti

[mix]

9. enjoyed that, beautifully wrought n/t

[Poiuyt]

10. The GDP improved under Roosevelt's New Deal every year except one -

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009020603/fdr-failed-myth

The basic economic facts from the 1930s—according to the Department of Commerce, the Federal Reserve, and other official sources—are fundamentally different from the unsupported claims put forward by Shlaes and prominent in popular myth. The monthly data for industrial production show a near three-year collapse under President Hoover, ending when FDR came to office in March 1933. Production rocketed by 44 percent in the first three months of the New Deal and, by December 1936, had completely recovered to surpass its 1929 peak.

[Wednesdays]

11. If FDR's policies didn't work, 1946 would have been a disaster

...and every year after that, too. True, there was a slight dip in 1946 due to the GI's coming home, but it was minor. In fact, things pretty much held steady until the Nixon years.

[FreakinDJ]

12. If not for the New Deal we would be in a Horrible Depression now

The safety net is holding up America right now

[TexasObserver]

13. The GOP fought the New Deal in congress and the courts for years.

They did everything they could to derail the New Deal.

The truth is the New Deal helped immensely, but it could not correct all the ills of the economy in a short period of time. It took years, and during those years, the GOP was fighting it every step of the way.