After six years of FDR in office, The New Deal and The Second New Deal, the Great Depression finally bottomed out in 1939.
Did FDR's attempt to tax and spend the country out of the Depression make the Depression worse? It is hard to say, since we cannot have a controlled experiment that compares the Depression with FDR and the Depression without FDR.
Clearly, however, FDR's tax and spend policies did nothing to end the Depression. The Depression ended because of WWII.
That is the rub. The practice of monetary and fiscal policy is not an exact science at best. Arguments can be made that FDR's policies worked or did not work. The only agreement about FDR from people who actually lived through the Great Depression was that FDR instilled hope. That is where the O’ssiah won the election — the desire for leadership trumped any rational discussion of policy in the 2008 elections.
Hoover started the most massive spending increase to get America going, but conditions continued to deteriorate as big government interventions clouded investment opportunities.
FDR tried to almost dictatorially turn the Surpremes into his rubber stamp for his un constitutional economic polices. Further on his left were a series of even more crackpot politicians and of course those communists who were outright and not working from with in his administration.
The results of all this was that investment capital sat on the sidelines for over a decade.
The Depression didn't end with the beginning of the war. 11 able body males were pulled out of a population of around 150 million, so about one in five working age males were taken out of the labor force. Before the war unemployment was running around 20%.
In some ways you can say the government interventions caused the Depression, as much as they caused the war. Attributing the solution to the causing agent is kind of not kosher, in as much as 60 million were killed( another labor reducing activity) and the loss of a major part of European and Japanese productivity.
I know I am being a little expansive but I'm not one to let the lefties define the terms. Matter of fact if a Lefty says so and so, I know it isn't that, it must be something else.
What people forget too is that Hoover tried almost all of the same things that FDR did, from tax increases to work programs. It only made things worse, and FDR just piled onto the pain by increasing the intensity of the bad policies.
I’ve seen one economist call the depression a perfect storm of poor luck and more importantly poor policy.
The writer of this article is a real idiot.
I think you had better go check the actual GDP numbers. We achieved a recovery to levels better than pre-crash before the war started.