Asserting FDR "waged ... a jihad against private enterprise," Hume falsely claimed "everybody agrees ... that the New Deal failed"
SUMMARY: Brit Hume asserted on Your World that "the New Deal -- everybody agrees, I think, on both sides of the spectrum now, that the New Deal failed. The debate is over why it failed," later stating, "President [Franklin] Roosevelt waged what could only be called a jihad against private enterprise." In fact "everybody" doesn't "agree[]" that the New Deal failed; Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, among others, has said that Roosevelt did not go far enough to end the crisis and that his attempts to balance the budget hindered recovery.
Fox News Washington managing editor Brit Hume joined the ranks of conservative media figures attacking President Franklin D. Roosevelt's response to the Great Depression as a failure that worsened the economic crisis of the 1930s, asserting on the January 7 edition of Fox News' Your World that "the New Deal -- everybody agrees, I think, on both sides of the spectrum now, that the New Deal failed. The debate is over why it failed." He later asserted that "President Roosevelt waged what could only be called a jihad against private enterprise." However, Hume's assertion that "the New Deal failed" has been flatly rejected by some prominent economists, including Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, who has said that Roosevelt did not go far enough to end the crisis and that his attempts to balance the budget hindered recovery.
In a November 10, 2008, New York Times column, Krugman wrote that Roosevelt's policies included "long-run achievements" that "remain the bedrock of our nation's economic stability" and that Roosevelt's short-term successes were constrained because "his economic policies were too cautious."
Krugman further wrote:
Now, there's a whole intellectual industry, mainly operating out of right-wing think tanks, devoted to propagating the idea that F.D.R. actually made the Depression worse. So it's important to know that most of what you hear along those lines is based on deliberate misrepresentation of the facts. The New Deal brought real relief to most Americans.
[...]
F.D.R. wasn't just reluctant to pursue an all-out fiscal expansion -- he was eager to return to conservative budget principles. That eagerness almost destroyed his legacy. After winning a smashing election victory in 1936, the Roosevelt administration cut spending and raised taxes, precipitating an economic relapse that drove the unemployment rate back into double digits and led to a major defeat in the 1938 midterm elections.
During a roundtable discussion on ABC's This Week on November 16, responding to Washington Post columnist George Will's assertion that "the first New Deal didn't work," Krugman stated, in part: "Roosevelt got the economy moving somewhat. By 1937, things were a lot better than they were in 1933." He continued, "Then he was persuaded to balance the budget, or try to, and he raised taxes and cut spending and the economy went back down again. And it took an enormous public works program known as World War II to bring the economy out of the Depression."
Similarly, in a January 6 column, Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, wrote: "In reality, any careful reading showed that the New Deal policies substantially ameliorated the effects of the Great Depression for tens of millions of people. The major economic failing of the New Deal was that President Roosevelt was not prepared to push the policies as far as necessary to fully lift the economy out of the Great Depression." Baker continued:
Roosevelt was too worried about the whining of the anti-stimulus crowd that he confronted. He remained concerned about balancing the budget when the proper goal of fiscal policy should have been large deficits to stimulate the economy. Roosevelt's policies substantially reduced the unemployment rate from the 25 percent peak when he first took office, but they did not get the unemployment rate back into single digits.
Further, in a November 17 post on his personal blog, University of California-Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong wrote, "Private investment recovered in a very healthy fashion as Roosevelt's New Deal policies took effect. The interruption of the Roosevelt Recovery in 1937-1938 is, I think, wel [sic] understood: Roosevelt's decision to adopt more 'orthodox' economic policies and try to move the budget toward balance and the Federal Reserve's decision to contract the money supply by raising bank reserve requirements provide ample explanation of that downturn."
Progressive economists are not alone in crediting Roosevelt's policies for easing the economic crisis. As Newsweek senior editor Daniel Gross noted on his blog on January 4, 2007, Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke -- appointed by President George W. Bush -- wrote in his Essays on the Great Depression, "Only with the New Deal's rehabilitation of the financial system in 1933-35 did the economy begin its slow emergence from the Great Depression."
As noted in County Fair, during the "Mythbuster" segment on the January 7 edition of MSNBC's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, host David Shuster highlighted Fox News' role in spreading the myth that Roosevelt's New Deal worsened the Great Depression.
From the January 7 edition of Fox News' Your World with Neil Cavuto:
NEIL CAVUTO (host): I'm wondering, too -- there is another argument, not advanced by too many economists these days, but a lot of economists missed the slowdown anyway -- but who have said we've thrown a lot of money at this through the Fed, and what -- it's backing up the banking system, et cetera, and the money it's been flushing the system with to help banks and financial institutions, period.
And we're already seeing the fruits of that. Whether you agree or disagree with the wisdom of this sort of thing, we might already be seeing that, so why pile more on to this? I know that is a key Republican argument, but where does this whole debate stand?
HUME: Well, I think that this debate fits in with the debate that's been raging sort of below the radar for decades now, really more than a half-century -- has been the debate over why the New Deal failed to lift the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression. It didn't come out, Neil, as you well know, until we had the massive deficit spending that accompanied the second World War. And that finally --
CAVUTO: That's right. Eight years later. Eight years after that New Deal. Right.
HUME: That's right. Well, then, the New Deal -- everybody agrees, I think, on both sides of the spectrum now, that the New Deal failed. The debate is over why it failed. People on the left believe it failed because Roosevelt, at the end of the day, really didn't do enough spending, that it simply wasn't spending -- he was not spending, whether deficit spending or not, on a scale grand enough to lift the damaged U.S. economy out of that depression.
There are people on the other side of the spectrum who would say, maybe, but look at this as well. President Roosevelt waged what could only be called a jihad against private enterprise. He prosecuted leading figures in it, Andrew Mellon being a conspicuous example. He prosecuted little companies, butcher shops in New York, as has been laid out in Amity Shlaes' book about the new -- book about the history of the Great Depression.
It created a very uncertain, even poisonous atmosphere for business. That is not the atmosphere that you want, and I'm bound to say, Neil, that I don't think that's the atmosphere the Obama administration is seeking to create. The Obama administration is not showing any signs it wanted to wage the kind of war on private business that Roosevelt waged. The question, of course, still is whether the spending on the scale that we're seeing will end up doing more harm than good --
CAVUTO: Or that it would tantamount to that, anyway. And that gets us back to the spending that is planned and waking up after the party of that spending.
If history is going to be re-written, it won't be done by idiots like Cavuto and Hume.
Too many whose families benefitted from the new deal are still alive. And most of them have told their version of history to their children and grandchildren.
Exactly, if it were not for programs like the New Deal and great Presidents like FDR , America would never have survived the 1930s. Hume and that moron Cavuto are biased. According to them and the ilk they hang out with, the Government should let people starve in the streets.
Wasn't Cabooso saying that WW2 did more to restore the economy than anything FDR did?
Boortz and Limbaugh have made the same hypothesis.
I thought I heard that. Another interesting conundrum from conservatives. War will stimulate the economy and pull it out of a depression, but since war kills off potential consumers, you should see a reduction in consumer spending. Hmmm, not seeing the logic there...
It's the "concentration of wealth" theory.
Imagine the NFL expanding to 100 teams. Immediately, the quality of play would fall because of the dilution of talent. However, cut the NFL to 10 teams, and we get a team with Peyton Manning being backed up by Tony Romo, and with Michael Turner and Adrian Peterson in the backfield. Ergo, the best thing the NFL could do to raise the quality of play is to get rid of Dallas, Minnesota, and Atlanta.
Works the same in economics. Less folks = more wealth for each. And since we're going to need soldiers, and the poor don't have any wealth anyway...
Only snag I see is that we've got two wars going on right now. How long before this thing starts to work?
Plus, let's not forget that Americans as an ENTIRE WHOLE NATION sacrificed greatly during the years of WWII. Meaning, rationing of just about everything. Anything and everything that could be donated for, or collected for the war effort was done up and done all lines of American society. Let's just say that America was not a consumer nation during the time of WWII. We had to bind together, and make things work. I think they turned the great power of our manufacturing base (which we don't have any longer by the way) into a giant needed war production machine. They had refrigerator makers rolling out tanks and things like that.
I'm not sure where all of this bashing of FDR is coming from. From being heralded as one of the greatest Presidents ever (3 terms remember), to now he was an abject failure?? Yeah, right, OK guys, get over it. In reality, he would be what republicans would LOVE today. Pro war. Pro military spending. Of course, they wouldn't like all of those "work" programs he came up with, I mean, can't have the government, you know, employing people to build up much of the infrastructure of our country, much of what is still in use today, and crumbling because it's been neglected. Interstates, which made a lot of commerce easier, and able to be done by trucking was started by FDR, carried on by Truman.
Are some republicans really this stupid?
i think britty boy is leaving himself some wiggle room here. he's saying it "failed", which is really a relative term that anyone can debate. what the conservatives have been saying is that fdr made the depression "worse", which can be demonstrated as factually untrue. the unemployment rate under roosevelt never touched the 25 percent rate that hoover handed to him. after 1929 the rate shot up by large percentages every year.
and the biggest thing that roosevelt did to turn things around was something hoover refused to do for three years. roosevelt declared a bank holiday and then passed the federal deposit insurance act which guaranteed that if you put your savings in a bank, and the bank failed, the government would step in and see you got your money. it gave people confidence to put their money back in banks again. there were actually cases where people had savings in a bank, the bank goes out of business, but there were still foreclosures on the same people who lost savings, whose mortgages were with that bank. roosevelt gave instant confidence with his banking plan. had hoover's hands off, "let business run the country" economics continued for a few more years, we might have had a real insurrection.
In one sense..... these idiots and FoxNoise are kind of right about FDR and the New Deal.....
It failed because it was not written strong enough to keep the corporate whores from undermining it, rewritting it, crapping on it, and killing the parts of it that would have made this country great back then.... like universal healthcare!
As for what the New deal did accomplish..... no... it did not fail... it was a masterpiece then and now... Lets all hop that Obama strenghtens the New Deal and puts corporate whores in their place! Hopefully!
"If history is going to be re-written, it won't be done by idiots like Cavuto and Hume."
Maybe true, but unfortunately its already been rewritten along those lines by idiots like Ronald Reagan and dastards like Milton Friedman. Too many of our compatriots uncritically accept such statements as true simply because they've heard them so often.
We all need to challenge such revisionism with facts wherever it rears its greedy, honorless head.
I agree with that the only time the formating seems to come up is when you do a reply.
HUME:... why the New Deal failed to lift the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression. It didn't come out, Neil, as you well know, until we had the massive deficit spending that accompanied the second World War.... People on the left believe it failed because Roosevelt, at the end of the day, really didn't do enough spending...
Am I reading this wrong, or is Hume totally kicking his own ass here?
I thought that too. All of the cons that I've seen talking down the New Deal are saying that it was WWII that ended the Great Depression. Seemingly unaware that proves the point about massive government deficit spending being beneficial in such extraordinary times. Which would prove Krugman's contention about FDR not going far enough with his spending.
It's bizarre, and I've been seeing this disconnect from the right for months now. Sometimes within seconds , they'll dismiss any positive economic effect from spending, then acknowledge the positive effects of war spending.
Who do they think pays for a war?
Or is it just spending money here at home on producing something useful, as opposed to blowing sh*t up thousands of miles away, that they find so "wasteful"?
They're doing a pre-emptive strike on Obama's plan to stimulate our economy by? Yes, more spending...
Bombs aren't durable goods, and in fact, they make durable goods "un-durable". (???? whatever...)
Therefore they provide continuous employment. It's quite simple, actually.
Sometimes within seconds , they'll dismiss any positive economic effect from spending, then acknowledge the positive effects of war spending.
That's an easy one. For them, war expenses are more important than peace expenses.
WWII: war spending based on New Deal principles = giant, healthy Middle Class of the 50's and 60's
Iraq War: war spending based on corporate cronyism and Free-Market Fundamentalism = the craphole we're sinking into right now.
Everybody agrees except those smart enough to notice the stability and prosperity that lasted until Reaganomics.
Things are really getting weird with the right wing nuts now that they try venture into 2 areas where they are really particularly weak: history & economics.
The truth is that the talking points they are receiving from Nordquist, neo-cons and their neocon think tanks is that FDR is bad, bad, bad.
You must say the New Deal didn't work over & over & over to make it seem true.
Think about it: The free market small gov't anti-regulation crowd is scared and cornered. They never thought the country would go back to big gov't and big spending after Reagan and certainly not this quickly.
Yes, there is this wierd, recycycled John Birch Society nuttiness that seems to have become bible for the Republicans.
It just shows how extreme the party has become. No repub in the 50s would have said the New Deal was a failure-- they might have bad mouthed it, but not made false claims about the era.
speaking of regular joes, I see the plumber's butt crack is now a war correspondant for Israel.
Now that's a joke. I wonder if he can even write a coherent sentence about, well, anything??? Who is he "reporting" for? World Net Daily or some other conservative "news" source?
I think I heard it was Pajamas Media. Another crack source.
Oh, even better...
I'm still thinking (here is my conspiracy cap getting put on), that he was a GOP plant sent to "question" Obama, and then later be heralded by McCain's campaign as some sort of "everyman" that we all aspire to be. Heck yeah I'd like to be a plumber making over $250k/year, but of course, we all know that was a sham.
I think the only plumbers who made $250K a year worked for Nixon.
Hume is ridiculous... it was a CRUSADE waged by FDR...
I was 5 at the periof of the worst of the depression and I can tell you that my dad was disabled on the job and could no longer work. Roosevelt's New Deal was responsible for my mom's ability to work in a sewing room after trudging 3 1/2 miles to the WPA sewing room. Thus she could buy food for her 5 children. Every child in our family grew up and worked until retirement age and without the hel0p of Roosevelt, who knows how any one of us could have lived through those bleak days. I doubt Hume has any compassion for any of us, but for me, it seemed like a wise investment in the American people. But I do not expect a idealogue Republican to understand the sad plight of starving children whose mother was forced to explain that she had no food for them until the "New Deal" became a reality. But I picture neocons saying to us in spite of our poor nutrition and swollen bellies, "Go eat cake". You cn see how the ocnservative movement is out of vogue. It has no heart.
Thank you for sharing that. People that lived through the Depression have some amazing life experience which the neo-cons should not discard.
My grandfather ran a bank in a small South Dakota town. When the Depression hit, the farmers defaulted on their loans which my grandfather had made to them, and the bank failed. He eventually paid back all the default money himself, even as he had to support a wife and children (some had grown by then.) How many modern corporate cons take any responsibility when their corporations fail???
Even though he was a life long Republican, he benefited from Roosevelt's programs and worked as a paymaster at the port in Seattle during the war.
Yes Brit, the ONLY POSSIBLE way to describe the New Deal is "Jihad." And of course, the ONLY POSSIBLE way to describe Barack Obama is "Hitler Incarnate." And the ONLY POSSIBLE way to describe George W Bush is "Fearless Messianic Leader of Truth and Freedom!" We know, Brit... You keep telling us.
Yeah, I wonder if anyone else at FoxNews felt that "JIHAD by FDR" was just a tad over the top??
These folks have been waging a "jihad" against the New Deal since Goldwater (who, since dying, has acquired the reputation of a reasonable person ). What they refuse to realize is that, by becoming a "traitor to his class," FDR saved capitalism from it's own excesses and, by so doing, did more to "save" the USA from Communism than any and all Cold Warriors.
Thing is, compared to a lot of the nut jobs running around today, Goldwater WAS reasonable.
The right wants every one in America to be brainwashed into thinking that FDR was a communist. They have been trying to spew that for 50 years.
EWESTON. You hit thenail on the head. The wing nuts are scared s--tless of another NEW DEAL that could discredit their ideas and make them also rans for a long time.
Their ideas have already been discredited. 8 years of GW Bush have taught us that I would think, oh, and also 8 years of Ronnie, and GHW Bush before that. Yeah, Carter was pretty much not good at being Prez either, but that Clinton guy seemed to do a pretty decent job.
You forgot the magical Republican economic timeline-
Before Carter the only economic event of note is that FDR's crazed socialist philosophies created a Depression so severe that only a major global conflict was able to turn things around for the USA. After that things were just swell for a number of decades until out of nowhere Carter singlehandedly destroyed the American economy with no outside forces or previous problems at all.
Fortunately we were all saved by Reagan's magical powers which were so great that they created nearly 20 years of uninterrupted prosperity that were able to overcome the foolish tax raising policies of both Bush I and Clinton.
Sadly, Clinton's supreme evil was able to craftily create a scheme by which he would be able to reach out beyond his own term of office and destroy the economy under the brilliant leader Bush II.
But Bush II had a plan almost as good as Reagan's and things were just about to turn around for all of us when Obama was able to retroactively create a recession in 2007 after being elected in 2008.
But have no fear, Bush II's plan is so cunning and brilliant that the economic turnaround of 2010 will show us how amazing he really was.
Here is a question for Hume,Cavuto, and all of these so called conservative talk shows out there.
How do you know that the New Deal didn't work if you where not there?
I remember my parents telling me about the hard times and they said if it were not for the New Deal millions of people would have starved. Sure it didn't help the econamy but it put food on the table. So don't cut FDR and the New Deal down unless you were there.
And I think it went beyond just the usual ideological divides. I remember my mother telling me about how her grandfather, a relatively conservative, union-hating self-made small-businessman in the South, practically worshipped Roosevelt and the New Deal. He had bracelets made for all his granddaughters out of Roosevelt dimes when they came out in 1946. FDR was revered in THE SOUTH, of all places -- then the Solid (Democratic) South -- for what he did for the economy and bringing some of the rural areas in particular into the 20th century. My great-grandfather owned a string of movie theaters, and movies actually didn't do so badly during the Depression, since people needed something to mitigate the gloom. But he really did think FDR walked on water. And he wasn't alone. My father's father (the transplanted Yankee from a family of Ohio Republicans), an electrician, was actually more skeptical, and my father recalled comments about people being paid to stand around and do nothing.
bringing some of the rural areas in particular into the 20th century
True. We forget that the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Rural Electrification Adminsitration were both New Deal projects, without which fair hunks of the US would have remained without electricity for decades longer.
In fact, the latter, now as (I think it's called) the Rural Utilities Adminstration, still has a hand in providing electricity to rural areas. At least some argue that were it not for the involvement in the agency in establishing electric cooperatives and public-private partnerships, there would still be parts of the US without electricity because it could not be provided at sufficient profit to move a private ultility to act.
Somehow, I doubt those folks would think the New Deal "failed."
25% unemployement, think about it. That was the crisis. When numbers get higher than that, the risk of anarchy or socialist revolution increases. FDR was reviled by the wealthy Republicans but loved by a whole generation that he SAVED. If our grandfathers were around right now they wouldn't kindly tolerate the notion that the New Deal failed. Lying smucks.
I remember my grandfather reading to me from his diary from when he was in WWII, and when he, and the rest of his unit heard about FDR passing away. He said everyone was crying. And this was from some freakin' hard chargin' combat seeing men. They were all balling their eyes out because FDR had died. I think THAT says a lot if you ask me.
Is it stalking you?
Sort of OT, but related to the unemployment numbers, I saw Hannity last night still plugging away at the "tax refund for people who don't pay any taxes" bit.He naturally added his "fact" that half of America doesn't pay any taxes, and giggled to himself that tax refunds were going to people for "doing nothing".
Clearly, Hannity said that 50% of Americans "do nothing".As bad as the Bush economy is, I'm pretty sure even his administration couldn't bring about a 50% unemployment rate, so I have to assume Sean thinks that 1/2 of the country, including many of those beloved red-staters in the lower income levels, just sit around doing nothing all day.
I wonder how all of those real Americans who don't happen to be in the top 50% feel about Sean calling them lazy?
Corporations in the US pay less taxes than just about everybody else.
Several New Deal programs remain active, with some still operating under the original names, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The largest programs still in existence today are the Social Security System, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and Fannie Mae.
Hume and Cavuto are such tools. If they think that the New Deal didn't work, they might explain how the FDIC, FHA, TVA, Social Security system SEC, Fannie Mae, etc have managed to be effective for 60 years.
Most un-polarized looks at the New Deal are finally revealing that it WAS a failure. Take Social Security for example. It has revealed itselfe clearly as nothing but a Madoff-style ponzi scheme. See: www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/hale1.html
No one can dispute that our current financial crisis is a recent case of New Dealism run amock; the New York Times published a clear and present warning clear back in 1999! http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0DE7DB153EF933A0575AC0A96F958260
The profound naïveté of Congress ignored all warnings and brought us to our current state: www.breitbart.tv/?p=184743, www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/09/fannie_mae_and_congressional_d. and html,http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=JsfMicOgufA
Thank GOD for responsible sites like Media Matters, which offer the means for average citizens to present the unvarnished truths to the world that the mains stream media won't provide.
On the flipside, it allows you to re-hash all of the mainstream media material right here.I guess that comes with freedom.
Pardon me, kernal, but you are obviously unaware that Media Matters is all about FACTS, true and documented. The information provided is supplied by unvarnished news from the New York Times and CSPAN. Yes, there's a Fox News piece in there, but all it does is run videos from the same sources.
Throwing the same OPINIONS up time after time contributes little to delivering the TRUTH!!
By the way, there's a typo in my message: html,http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=JsfMicOgufA should have been http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=JsfMicOgufA
We can all tell that you're trying to be snide, and "cute", but alas, it's not working.
What in this article that MMFA has posted do you find not truthful, or can disprove? We get a lot of folks like you around here, talking about how wrong MMFA is, thing is, it's not MMFA that's wrong. They don't report on things, they just repeat that things that, I'm assuming, your heroes are saying on a daily basis.
So where did they trip up? And stop posting useless youtube links to hysterical right wingers. Come up with a non partisan reliable bit of information, and someone might actually believe you.
Whoa, there, Nellie!! <g>
There's not a word in anything I've posted that accuses MMFA of being "wrong." MMFA provides a profoundly important place for dialog on daily news, and when a Fox News opinion analyst makes a sweeping statement that "the New Deal failed", it deserves to be debated; there obviously was not enough air time for the debate to happen on that particular probram.
Hume is being paid for his opinions. It's very productive to stimulate debate among citizens on such things; that way we all receive more information and more points to ponder. He stirred up a hornet's nest; so let's all contribute facts from reliable sources on each side of the argument, and hopefully gain some new insights on the issue.
I assume you love this country as much as I do, and I also assume you are well enough informed to be worried as hell about how we're going to get out ot this mess. We all need to try to suppress hysteria in times like these. We've got to learn to pull together. I admit the political climate during the last 8 years has not been conducive to that; we need to calm down, fight the hysteria, the toxic political insults, and try to work together to seek the truth.
Our new president seems to have a cool head and a determination to succeed. He'll do that sooner rather than later if we all cut the crap, come together, and help each other understand what in the H*** is really going on and fix it!!!
Hume is being paid for his opinions. It's very productive to stimulate debate among citizens on such things;
Sorry charlie. Hume's opinions are based on LIES. Therefore, it is not productive to stimulate debate based on a false premise. Hopefully you can see that his LIES about the New Deal are intended to undermine public opinion of Obama's recovery plan. Hume looks to me to be very un-American.
You start your comment with "most unpolarized.." and then proceed to link to 3 different rabidly conservative sites. And then try to take some sort of moral high ground saying we all have to work together?
Really?
I admit the political climate during the last 8 years has not been conducive to that; we need to calm down, fight the hysteria, the toxic political insults, and try to work together to seek the truth.
Why does that sound like a neocon slogan? They ask to "work together" now that they are out of power but as soon as they get back into power......
Hume (like the rest at Fox) is a psy-ops operative. He is being paid to propagate the misinformation and disinformation manufactured for him by the scholars-for-hire at the reichwing 'stink tanks'... propaganda factories founded for just that purpose by angry, indolent remnants of the Robber Baron class... Richard Mellon "Dickie" Scaife, Joseph Coors, et al.
It is not 'productive' to disinform, distract, and deliberately promote dissention with phony debates about false pseudo-facts and deliberate bald-faced lies.
There simply is no debate to be had regarding the successful effect of FDR's New Deal policies. That jury has long been in. There's no debate amongst academic or professional economists, economic historians, political scientists -- from Keynes to Friedman... from Galbraith to Krugman to Bernanke -- for it is all a matter of well-understood, unambiguous public record. The scoreboard says FDR won. The scoreboard says that rampant, unregulated, speculative greed lost. The scoreboard says that FDR's New Deal saved capitalism from itself.
To suggest otherwise goes well beyond just 'getting it wrong,' or 'having a different opinion.' It is one of two things: if it isn't hallucinogen-induced lunacy, then it must instead be a deliberate lie... one which we now see being made over and over all across the reichwing Wurlitzer echo-chamber, made with the malicious objective of creating a reliably-confused Stupidtariat and politically-useful idiocracy.
You rolled the dice and came up with right wing web "thinkers" that use convoluted logic to protect their failed pet theories of history. Too bad history disagrees with them. For people with that agenda, you get more stinkin' from thinkin' than from drinkin'
Social Security has provide SECURITY for the average person for 60 years. It has succeeded. Why are you so obtuse?!
Social Security has failed? How is that anyway? My parents, who hardly saved a nickel in their lifetimes, instead raising a somewhat large family, and spending all of their money on their kids, are able to eat because of Social Security, as did my grandparents before them, and my great grandparents. Yep, it is such a dismal failure that, it's still going, and projected to keep going for quite some time. Wow! I can't believe how BAD social security is... Jeesh, to think...
If you think the NY Times was predicting failures in 1999, who took office the next year? W. 'Nuff said. This was a President, and his buddies, who were saying right up until the bottom completely dropped out, that everything was FINE...
American Thinker? You're going to use that as some sort of "source"? Seriously, lay off the pipe man.
As the good Col already said, you just re-hased FoxNews. Nice work!
Most un-polarized looks at the New Deal are finally revealing that it WAS a failure.
Of course all those widows, widowers, sick people, disabled etc. over the last 50 years who ended up with no income in their late years could have starved, lived in the cold, relied on charity, or begged in the street. Now that would have been a REAL FAILURE, and a terrible indictment of our society and country.
Oops. This was supposed to appear above.
I'm an idiot. Thank you.
cording to the wingnuts, you've got lots of company here. Mind some of us are self acknowledged idiots already. %~)
This trashing of FDR and the New Deal just might work if us old-timers begin dying off. I was born in nineteen-ought-and-thirty-five, dagnabbit! The main reason the conservative morons might make a dent in the facts of the Depression is maybe the infiltration of more right-wing nuts into the educational system. As one poster said, conservatives are not too good at history and economics. Recall how the communists re-wrote history whenever it suited them? The Brit Humes are maybe counting on the ignorance of more contemporary Americans' lack of accurate historical evidence.
the CONServatives are not big fans of the NLRB which is another FDR legacy.
The New Deal not only was an economic stimulus package, it aso saved lives and, very likely, prevented revolution in the United States.
If the Republican programs had continued after 1932, you would have had famine, you would have had epidemics in the majorcities arising out of malnutrition and the lack of sanitation that accompanies large homeless populations--you would have had, like the 20's bonus army, millions of people converging on Washington D.C., only this time, the army might not have fired on them, and might even joined them--which is what happened in Tsarist Russia.
Alternately, you would have had a demagoue--probably Huey Long, rising up and blaming the people's misery on the Eastern Jewish Bankers and being installed as President in '36 where he would have declared martial law, nationalised industry, suspended habeas corpus, and joined the Axis.
The United States was only peaceful because the populace knew that Roosevelt was doing something, handing the poor lifelines, and on their side. The Republicans, even in the depths, were wailing about Socialism and The Dole, and steadfastly (even among those who supported deficit spending) opposed aid to the poor.
These jokers ignore just haw bad it was, but then, they're the direct heirs of the folks who caused the first crash and the lickspittles of those who caused this one.
Sorry to continue to nitpick, but the Bonus Army consisted of tens of thousands of veterans and their families - nothing on the order of "millions of people converging on Washington, D.C."
Nice post. The monied creeps don't care about anyone but themselves. I'm sure they think things would have been better if the poor had just got to dying to relieve the surplus population. Compassionate conservatism is an oxymoron.
Exactly. "compassionate" cons think Ebenezer Scrooze before his transformation is a great role model.
Lets be clear about the policies of FDR repeated over and over here by mmfa and Krugman:
-- in 1936, the Roosevelt administration cut spending and raised taxes, precipitating an economic relapse -- Krugman
-- By 1937...he was persuaded to balance the budget, or try to, and he raised taxes and cut spending and the economy went back down again -- Krugman
A key element in some of FDR's failings are clearly noted by mmfa and Krugman...raising taxes. If Obama is positioning himself to be a disciple of FDR's policies...I hope he remembers the failings of higher taxes during an economic downturn.
Wesley, those are points well taken. Everybody should purchase and read "The End of Prosperity". It's a dynamite fast course on economics re tax policy. It gives well deserved credit to Hoover, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush II for knowing that reducing taxes ends a recession (note: that's an oversimplification!!)
Only if you are completely out of firewood. It's junk-economics... "hokum for yokels."
Laffer is a completely discredited "give more to the rich" ninny with zero substance behind his claims. "Supply-side," "trickle-down" claptrap was never -- as later admitted by David Stockman, Reagan's budget director -- anything more than a smokescreen for driving the federal budget deep into deficit in order to force the meataxe slashing of social program spending... to "starve the Beast," in Stockman's words.
clinton raised taxes on the wealthy, not reduced them, and the economy boomed.
Taxes couldn't have been the problem; they were relatively high [for the rich] up until Reagan came in.
mmfa touts Krugman as the ecomics expert...and he plainly states that raising taxes was cause of economic reversals under FDR.
Here's a suggestion...address your post to mmfa if you think you have a case.
The crux of Krugmen's agreement is that FDR didn't do enough spending during his first term in office and he cut spending during his second term to try to balance the budget.
No wonder you are so consistently wrong about everything, you only hear what you want to hear. Typical ideologue behavior. The other half of Krugman et al argument was that FDR cut spending.
Idiot.
Let me give this a try wesley;
Lets be clear about the policies of FDR repeated over and over here by mmfa and Krugman:
-- in 1936, the Roosevelt administration CUT SPENDING and raised taxes, precipitating an economic relapse -- Krugman
-- By 1937...he was persuaded to balance the budget, or try to, and he raised taxes and CUT SPENDING and the economy went back down again -- Krugman
A key element in some of FDR's failings are clearly noted by mmfa and Krugman...CUTTING SPENDING. If Obama is positioning himself to be a disciple of FDR's policies...I hope he remembers the failings of CUTTING SPENDING during an economic downturn.
See thats not so difficult to understand
... I note that you only highlight the "raised taxes" part. Ever consider that the problem was the coincident cutting of spending? Raise taxes (towards the top) and increase spending and happy days are here again!
Obama should ELIMINATE income taxes for everyone from $0 to $25,000 per year, then implement a graduated scale that ends with every buck over $500,000 or so getting taxed at 90% - just like that commie Dwight Eisenhower supported during the most remarkable hey-day the US economy has ever seen.
...then he needs to enforce the Sherman Anti-trust act, enabling real wide-spread small-scale entreprenuership that has some chance of success.
...and laws need to be crafted that keep American jobs and American production in America. The fatcats can move to the Caymans, India, or Dubai if they please, but they'll have to leave their capital right back here!
Actually, didn't Hume just repeat what Krugman said? Hume said that the Left believes FDR didn't spend enough and specifcially mentioned deficit spending, and Krugman said that the New Deal failed because FDR didn't go far enough and spent too much time trying to balance the budget.
Didn't Hume present both sides' criticisms fairly in that regard?
Krugman would never characterize the New Deal as a failure. It put millions of Americans back to work; it established Social Security and unemployment insurance; the FDIC was created with the Banking Act; and the NLRA was passed.
The New Deal was, however, limited bacause FDR was politically conservative (most of this stuff passed because the American people pushed him and the Congress to do it) and he didn't feel comfortable with deficit spending until he had no other choice with WW2.
That should be "limited because".
But then we're doing battle over mere semantics. MMFA specifically used Krugman's argument that the New Deal didn't go far enough, and Hume's language reflected that.
If that is the case, then MMFA's line of argument should be that Hume used hyperbole, not that he did not reflect the criticisms both sides have about the New Deal.
no semantics. hume said "everybody agrees..that the new deal failed". no, everyone does not agree with that.
Those jerks would have let half of America starve to death just to keep money rolling into the pockets of the rich. We have no use for these people any more. It's been proven that their fiscal viewpoint is poisonous to the well-being of every day Americans. I swear I can't stand their ilk. We need to show them whose country this is.
Those jerks would have let half of America starve to death just to keep money rolling into the pockets of the rich. We have no use for these people any more. It's been proven that their fiscal viewpoint is poisonous to the well-being of every day Americans. I swear I can't stand their ilk. We need to show them whose country this is.
Hume's assertion is right out of Fox News' updated playbook. It depends largely on interviews of conservative economics journalist Amity Shlaes, author of a new book, "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression." I understand that in that book (which I have not read) Shlaes reasonably argues that Roosevelt's interventionist policies ameliorated but never quite tamed the Great Depression. From there (based on interviews of Shlaes) Fox leaped to the cockeyed conclusion that Democrat FDR was overrated and even prolonged the depression. Then the line became "Everyone agrees that the New Deal failed," as if no one alive remembers what happened 70 years ago. Incidentally, Shlaes is an English major, not an economist.
As for the 65-year-old Hume, his soon-to-end television career has an intriguing symmetry. Upon moving from investigative print reporting (for muckraker for Jack Anderson) to ABC News three decades ago, Hume cited incompatibility between television and sound investigative reporting: "An investigative report requires that the viewer concentrate on what he's being told. It's usually complicated stuff, and sophisticated in the sense that it requires that the viewer concentrate on what he's being told. But TV makes you mentally lazy. It may be in the nature of the medium. We are not used to thinking while watching TV -- so we won't and don't." (Source: "TV Guide: The First 25 Years, Simon and Schuster, New York: 1978)
Humes' Fox News years, 1996 to the present, have found him literally banking on viewers' mental laziness. Perhaps "Everyone agrees that the New Deal failed" is his current-day idea of an investigative sentence.
Jerry Elsea
We really have to stop this bipartisanship nonsense if we want to change our country for the good of all. These people on the right have no problem sleeping at night after spreading their brand of false Christianity, and historical fact. Peggy Noonen said today on Good Morning Joe that Conservatives stood for peace (lie), over the last hundred years almost all wars have been stared by Republican Presidents. Day after day these Republican Pundits go on the air and try to re-write history in favor of their political party when in fact all the problems we have to day have been caused by their deception and greed.
The New Deal failed only in that it left alive some fascists along the lines of Hume, Cavuto, and Ronald Reagan to derail it by perfidy and subterfuge in subsequent decades.
Keep repeating the same lie and your followers will believe it as though it were Gospel. Good work, Brit, you've kept to the same script as Rush, Sean and Billo.
"the New Deal failed to lift the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression. It didn't come out, Neil, as you well know, until we had the massive deficit spending that accompanied the second World War. And that finally --"
And how well has massive deficit spending worked during Bush's war?
WWII: massive deficit spending combined with generous prescribed wages and benefits for labor; immense increases in corporate taxes; a regulatory code effectively tracking war spending; a progressive income tax code lenient at the base and draconian at the top; and an explicit policy of "NO WAR MILLIONAIRES!".
Bush's Wars: massive deficit spending combined with rapid attrition of pro-labor regulations; a steady decrease in real wages; massive tax cuts for industry and the wealthy; a total absence of oversight of spending and a documented policy of no accountibility for deliverables from the administration's arms industry cronies; a record crop of WAR BILLIONAIRES among the neocons and their friends.
You see; it helps when you apply institutional altruism and the rule of law.