Posted on 01/12/2009 5:06:17 AM PST by publius1
....But today, the new focus is Mr. Obama’s stimulus package. If F.D.R.’s New Deal spending made things worse, it follows that the Obama administration should not make the same mistake.
The anti-New Deal line is wrong as a matter of economics. F.D.R.’s spending programs did help the economy and created millions of new jobs. The problem, we now know, is not that F.D.R. spent too much priming the pump, but rather that he spent too little. It was his decision to cut back on spending on New Deal programs that brought about a nasty recession in 1937-38.
The second problem is that the criticism overlooks the relief Roosevelt’s programs brought to millions. When F.D.R. took office, unemployment was 25 percent, and families were losing their homes, living in shantytowns, even fighting one another for food at garbage dumps.
The difference that the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration and other New Deal public works programs made in people’s lives is incalculable...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The conclusion is straight from the Times regular ideology book: the New Deal helped all those poor little people... To wit:
"Congressional Republicans say Mr. Obama’s stimulus will cost too much, and that over time the economy will cure itself. When critics raised the same objections to F.D.R.’s programs, his relief administrator, Harry Hopkins, had a ready answer: “People don’t eat in the long run. They eat every day.”"
*** You have to read the whole thing not to believe it.
This is one way in which the Left goes askew in its thinking. Ever since the time of FDR, it has been axiomatic for the Left (and also too many Republicans) that a primary purpose of the government is to create or preserve jobs. It's all about unemployment, you see.
In fact, it out to be about growing the economy and increasing production. Government-funded jobs cannot do that. Siphoning money away from productive resources in order to create government jobs is exactly where FDR (and Obama) get it wrong.
Roosevelt's Agricultural Adjustment Acts authorized the destruction of millions of livestock animals and enforced scarcity in many other food crops in an effort to make agribusiness profitable again.
NYT: ....Where's OUR bailout check?....Well, 0Bambi? 
Stimulus money will do no good.
What will work is eliminating NAFTA and putting US workers back to work.
That is how the depression was ended in 1941.
Old liberal argument. When something fails it’s because we didn’t spend enough.
I wish someone would do a study on the psychological depression (not financial) that comes with receiving jobs one did not earn or money one did not earn. Nothing could be more disheartening.
And when people become THIS freaking STUPID and inattentive to their freedoms, THIS is the PRESIDENT they deserve.
Do you mean getting the something for nothing, or the results of the study? I'd submit it would be the latter, we've raised two or three generations of gimmie-gimmies out there who think they are entitled to make-work jobs, affirmative action, free college and food stamps, and welfare on top of it all.
Does a dog who steals a bone from another dog that worked fishing it out of a dump feel guilty about taking the bone?
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