Guess what? The New Deal worked!

[IndianaGreen]

Guess what? The New Deal worked!

Author: Steven Conn
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 02/18/09 19:30

Since the economic crisis we're now in is being compared to the Great Depression, the solutions being offered are being routinely compared to the New Deal. Republicans in particular have been quick to pronounce the New Deal a failure as a way of justifying their opposition to the new stimulus package and any other federal response to our new Great Depression.

Congressman Steve Austria (R-Ohio) is so angry at the New Deal that he told an audience recently that Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal actually caused the Great Depression: quite an achievement given that the Great Depression was already three years deep by the time FDR was elected.

Whatever you think of the Obama administration's proposals, to declare the New Deal a failure gets the history fundamentally wrong. The legacy that FDR created proved remarkably successful and remarkably enduring.

The New Deal operated at three levels: first, the programs established by the New Deal worked immediately to bring economic relief; second, the long-term changes the New Deal made to the structure of our economy brought the cycles of the economy under better control; and, finally, the New Deal re-shaped the social contract between our citizens and our government.

We usually associate the New Deal with the programs it created to put people to work, such as the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. Republicans hated these programs. They denounced the WPA as "We Putter Around." The new Republican National Committee chairman, Michael Steele, recently parroted this accusation when he tried to explain that the government never creates jobs, just work.

But the New Deal did provide jobs to hundreds of thousand of unemployed Americans, and while they "puttered" those workers managed to build tens of thousands of bridges, paved countless miles of roads, and planted 3 billion trees.

http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/14540/

[Historic NY]

1. Ignorant Repukes..you can fool old greatest generation people....

on some things but most will give you the true score on the New Deal & FDR.

[democracy1st]

2. If we could only get darn democrats to fight back and take up for FDR we'd be alright