Posted on 09/23/2014 9:49:15 AM PDT by iowamark
My seventh-grade son recently wrote a U.S. History paper extolling the virtues of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. “It ended the Great Depression,” he wrote with great certainty. He’s only 12 and parroting what the history texts and his teachers told him.
That’s his excuse. What’s Ken Burns’?
Mr. Burns’ docudrama on the Roosevelts — for those who weren’t bored to tears — repeats nearly all the worn-out fairy tales of the FDR presidency, including what I call the most enduring myth of the 20th century, which is that FDR’s avalanche of alphabet-soup government programs ended the Great Depression. Shouldn’t there be a statute of limitations on such lies?
Ask nearly anyone over the age of 80, and they will say that FDR cared about the working man and “gave the country hope,” a point that Mr. Burns emphasizes. Roosevelt exuded empathy, which isn’t a bad thing — remember Bill Clinton’s memorable line “I feel your pain”? — but caring doesn’t create jobs or lift gross domestic product.
Nor does spending government money revive growth, despite the theories put into practice by the then-dean of all economists, John Maynard Keynes. Any objective analysis of these facts can lead to no other conclusion. U.S. unemployment averaged a rate of 18 percent during Roosevelt’s first eight years in office. In the decade of the 1930s, U.S. industrial production and national income fell by about almost one-third. In 1940, after year eight years of the New Deal, unemployment was still averaged a god-awful 14 percent...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
The stupid...it’s Burns.
I once asked Mother if the depression had ended when WWII began.
She told me that things had gotten a little better but we were still in the depression until WWII.
There were no such "honorable intentions" upon the part of the elitist who cooked up socialism in the first place.
For anyone who is questioning FDR’s whole game...I’d suggest to go back and review the Bonus Army, the Anacosta Riots, General MacArthur actions during the riot, newspaper coverage of the riots, and reaction by voters in the 1932 election. President Hoover never realized the news media machine he was against...until it was too late.
No high school or college history class will pick up the Bonus Army, or cover this critical summer period of the election.
Democrats hate rich people. Except when they’re their rich people...
FDR’s avalanche of alphabet-soup government programs ended the Great Depression. .......................... Really, if you ask me, it was Mr. Tojo and that what’s his name guy, from Germany, who we see daily on the History Channel. Those 2 were the ones who really got us out of the depression and put 13 million of our guys on the gov’t payroll.
I saw that gawdawful fdr memorial in DC. It is inscribed with all his “rights,” none of which is in the Constitution and also carry no corresponding responsibilities.
I was commenting and laughing fairly loudly until Mrs. FD got me to hush lol...
World War II interrupted the Great Depression in the United
States. The death of FDR ended it. The election of Republicans in Congress in 1946 and 1948 were the final nails in the coffin. That crap about FDR and Keynesian economics ending the depression is a Democrat fairy tale.
The New Deal turned a normal recession into a depression.
It took WW2 to end the economic mess the new deal created.
Ken Burns is great at emotional little vignettes from ordinary people of the past. Nothing wrong with that, but that’s all he’s got and he should stick to it. He should not try to pass off his bathos as history.
Hitler and Tojo ended the Depression.One needn’t be a brain surgeon to figure *that* out.
How can FDR be at fault for the Bonus Army? The bonus march happened in the summer of 1932. FDR became POTUS in 1933.
Re: “Stephen Moore is chief economist at the Heritage Foundation.”
Stephen Moore also supports massive LEGAL immigration - currently 1.1 million per year (and 30 million since the Reagan Amnesty in 1986).
Stephen Moore also supports Amnesty for the roughly 12 million illegal immigrants currently in the USA.
Stephen Moore also supports a dramatic increase in work visas for foreign workers - currently about 750,000 per year.
Step one: Pass legislation that destroys the economy.
Step two: Pass legislation that seemingly helps those that were hurt the most by step one.
Step three: If something happens (like a war) and the economy eventually starts to recover on it own from the shock of Step 1, claim credit for the recovery and hail the measures taken in Step two as cause of the recovery. Then go back and repeat step one with additional destructive legislation.
Meanwhile all the while vilifying any attempt by anyone to stop or repeal anything done in step 1 or 2 and instead blame the decenter's for the economic destruction.
When FDR heard how President Hoover/Gen. MacArthur handled the Bonus March, he remarked that he had just won the election.
And the Bonus March is touted by liberals.
I have been watching the Ken Burns thing. He clearly showed that the ramp up to WWII was what got America out of the Depression.
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