there was an evil socialist who made the the Great Depression worse.
On Christmas Eve, the conservative pundit Monica Crowley argued on Fox News that instead of rescuing America from the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt's spending on public works made it worse.
Everybody said so.
She insisted that this bizarre claim was confirmed by "all kinds of studies and academic work."
Really. Everybody.
The show’s host backed her up. "Yes," said Gregg Jarrett, "I think historians pretty much agree on that."
Not only did the evil un-American socialist make the depression worse, he made it deeper. You might even say he was the cause
Say it with me: The New Deal prolonged the Great Depression. In fact, if anything it was the New Deal itself that made the Great Depression "Great."
Which was a really good trick, since it had been going on for four years before the evil socialist stole the country away from Real Americans. Of course, there were some crazy people who said that the evil socialist made things better. Crazy evil un-American socialist people said that. And of course, they were wrong
Federal spending exploded under Herbert Hoover and exploded even more under Franklin Roosevelt, during whose first two terms the federal budget more than doubled. Where was the "stimulus" such furious expenditure should have produced?
The evil socialist did not make things better, what with his giving people jobs and investing in parks and infrastructure. He even sent some of that money to get people working on conservation, you know green jobs, which proves how evil he was. And un-American.
No, the evil socialist was a failure. The only thing that ended the Great Depression was a Really Big War, because everyone knows the only things that can solve problems are wars and tax cuts.
So the crazy evil socialist people and their scary, scary government drowned in a bathtub and Real Americans all became millionaire investment banker entrepreneurs. Except for the really good ones, who turned into right wing pundits!
Now, put on those Ronnie Reagan footie pajamas and get to sleep, or the Greenspan Fairy will never come to leave tasty credit default swaps under your pillow.
The End |
The funny thing about this fairytale is that everyone does say it. The Republicans started in on "stimulus doesn't work" while FDR was still inking the New Deal, and they've never paused in their contention that spending can't help. Perhaps that's because (as recent actions in the stock market show), Republicans don't understand numbers. Oh, and there's also the little problem that showing how effective government action can be in helping the economy completely negates the whole conservative spiel.
Did the stimulus provided by the New Deal work? Here's a real economist (Charles McMillion, the former associate director of the Johns Hopkins University Policy Institute and a former contributing editor of the Harvard Business Review -- see, he has a name and everything, unlike the mythological "all kinds" of folks on the right) to tell you about it.
It is imperative to expose a dangerous popular myth regarding the efficacy of President Roosevelt’s actions: that it was not the programs of the New Deal, but only the placing of the nation on a wartime footing years later, that restored the health of the nation’s economy.
This belief, though widely held, cannot stand up to even the most basic economic analysis. Yet the mainstream corporate media, which abound with anti-government ideology, seek to reinforce this myth.
Almost all of the commentary on the right these days draws from a single source, The Forgotten Man, by Amity Shlaes. You can think of Shlaes as the Coulter of conservative economics. Her book is peppered with the horrors experienced by the nation under FDR. (Did you know that somebody in Brooklyn got so depressed that they committed suicide while Roosevelt was president? It's true!) Shlaes, whose academic background is untarnished by any actual study of economics, is the perfect packager of the Republican myth, and her book carefully avoids all those nasty facts that tend to get in the way of the plot.
In it, Shlaes... completely leaves out any specific data on gross domestic product, incomes, consumer spending, production, investment or jobs even for the New Deal period she presumes to explain. Indeed, her pitch is based entirely on emotional misrepresentation.
Income, production, jobs... what do those things have to do with the Great Depression? Not much, if you're Republican. If anyone on the right had bothered to check any of these numbers, what would they find? Something like this.
Source: Campaign for America's Future |
Where was the stimulus? Just take a look. From the moment FDR began to enact the programs of the New Deal, the economy began its recovery. After four years of steady declines, Roosevelt's programs brought on an immediate improvement in the national fortune. Within three years, the national GDP exceeded the level in 1929. By the time the bombs fell at Pearl Harbor, the GDP had been up every year but one since 1933, and that one downward tick in 1937 marks the exact point at which budget hawks forced cuts in the New Deal programs.
That's the story the numbers tell. The New Deal worked, worked well, and worked quickly. These days, we define recessions as two consecutive quarters of declining gross domestic product. By that measure, when did the Great Depression end? One quarter after Roosevelt took office, that's when. Yes, it took years to repair the damage of the anything goes marketeers, but the recovery started the moment the New Deal started.
But even clamping their hands over their eyes and refusing to look at the numbers isn't the strangest part of the Republican Myth of FDR Failure. The oddest idea is that "putting the nation on a war footing" was the cure that finally ended the depression when the New Deal couldn't get the job done. It's something that gets repeated every time this tall tale is told, because even Republicans realize that the Great Depression did end. They just have to think of some way to give credit to something other than Democrats.
So Republicans have developed the idea the government putting people to work, spending on public works, and taking a bigger hand in the markets couldn't possibly help. Instead, things were cured when the government put even more people to work, spent many times more, and took absolute control of prices and wages.
Sure, let's go with that.
But if they really believe that wars are stimulating, you have to ask: why aren't we stimulated? We have two wars going on. We've invested lots of capital -- including the kind that lives, breathes, and has family -- but that doesn't seem to be shooting the GDP skyward. Maybe Republicans think we need to take on a bigger target. Would a war with Iran get the stimulus working? Or is this stimulus more China-sized?
Maybe it's not the fighting on the ground that makes the difference. Maybe it's that "war footing" at home. You know, the one that comes hundreds of thousands of more government employees, and the OPA setting the prices of every item on the shelves, and government rationing, and higher taxes. Is that what the Republicans think it will take to stimulate the economy?
Crazy socialists.