Higher Taxes on High Earners and Increased Unionization Didn't Work for FDR
Reader Comments
What the people thought
The average guy must have thought Roosevelt was doing something right. Even if abstract statistics said the New Deal wasn't pulling America from the Great Depression, it was making lives better for the masses, who cast their judgment on the New Deal by giving Roosevelt a landslide win over Alf Landon.
If the New Deal wasn't working, why did America render such a contrary verdict in 1936? And again in 1940?
Recovery
We have a borrowing and spending problem, not a "lack of liquidity" problem per se. We are in an enormous hole and the first rule of recovery is to STOP DIGGING. I'm not sure what the exact solution to the ills of the financial sector are but after deposits are guaranteed I think more than a few Chapter 11's need to occur and a whole bunch of heads need to roll (including board members who let this crap go on and, most especially, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd). The numbers being thrown about are stupefying. I honestly don't think that Paulson or anybody else knows how to stop a major recession from happening and I suspect that it's because it's going to occur regardless. And now we'll be totally broke on top of being jobless with no manufacturing base. Hope y'all know how to grow and can food.
Revisionist History
If one believes this article and the comment, all hope is forever lost. Before FDR the country was in similar shape as it is today. After FDR we became the greatest country in history (from whatever angle you view it).
The one thing GWB has said that is true is that we have done it before and we will do it again (without him in charge, albeit).
FDR - HIS TIMES ARE NOT OURS...
Just a little reality check... The US got out of the Great Depression not because of FDR but rather, in spite of him.
America became The Arsenal of Democracy in the late 1930's. Manufacturing power is what pulled the nation out of its economic pit and, I might add, won the war against Fascism in the bargain. That industrial strength and an united, self sacrificing, national will is what led to victory over the forces of darkness that were then goose-stepping over the globe.
We no longer have the industrial might or the national unity, so apparent, in the grim years of W.W.II. Industries have been gutted by draconian environmental regulation, greedy corporate executives, out sourcing of jobs and factories - and progressive elitists in education who, for decades, have scoffed at blue collar jobs as being beneath contempt to the nation's school children.
Further, "national unity" has given way to the worship of individual cultural heritage and dozens of opportunistic organizations that seek to create classes of "victimhood" for nearly every group except white Christian males or women who are pro-life. And further corrupted by left wing educators who smear our heroes of the past and seek to find dark causes in our nation’s motives. They do this through the rosy lens of revisionist hindsight - Never bothering to understand, or better, to immerse themselves in the actual circumstances, imperatives and alternatives extant in that past. The honor of, and pride in, our nation suffers because of their intellectual sloth and ideologic agenda.
I know these truths are a bitter thing and so will be rejected by those progressive relativists on the left and Republican barons of greed on the right. And so, we will ultimately fail as a nation divided - As Lincoln and the Bible simply put it, "A house divided against itself can not stand."
