New Deal Debate: for most of the New Deal era, the economy grew quickly - 13% from '33-'37

[mod mom]

WaPo trashes the GOP talking points with (get this) FACTS!

For Insight on Stimulus Battle, Look to the '30s
For Left and Right, Issue Rekindles New Deal Debate

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 12, 2009; Page D01

Underlying the partisan division over President Obama's stimulus bill is a dispute over history -- a decades-old debate between liberals and conservatives over the impact the New Deal had in bringing the country out of the Great Depression.

-snip

But most mainstream economists say the lessons of the Depression, which didn't end until World War II spending kicked in, are different. They say New Deal spending programs instituted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt -- combined with moves to bolster the banking system, loosen monetary policy and end the gold standard -- did help put millions of people back to work. At the same time, they say that federal spending increases under Roosevelt before the war were modest compared with the size of the economy, and not a good test of stimulus spending.

"The Depression at its worst moment had 25 percent unemployed," said Alice Rivlin, former Clinton budget director and former director of the Congressional Budget Office. "Many of those people got back to work. Not all of them. We still had very high unemployment for many years. But to say it didn't work is to say we know what would have happened without it."

Like most disputes about the past, the wrestling match over the lessons of the Depression has everything to do with the present. If Roosevelt's New Deal programs -- such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration and Social Security -- didn't revive the economy in the 1930s, Republicans in Congress have a powerful argument justifying their opposition to President Obama's stimulus program. And if the Roosevelt programs worked, Democrats can justify the huge stimulus package as following a successful precedent.

In fact, for most of the New Deal era, the economy grew quickly -- an annual rate of about 13 percent from 1933 to 1937 and more than 10 percent from 1938 to 1941, Commerce Department data show.

-snip

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/11/AR2009021104092.html


Here is some revisionist history from GOP hacks:

New Deal gets Raw Deal from the right
Published Tue, Feb 10, 2009 1:42pm ET by Karl Frisch

Pam’s House Blend picks up on the right’s revisionist New Deal history as does Down with Tyranny who notes:

...their latest assault on reality, echoed by Limbaugh's cadres in Congress: The New Deal Was A Failure. Franklin D Roosevelt won his first term against a pillar of Republicanism, incumbent reactionary Republican Herbert Hoover. Hoover managed to garner 59 electoral votes against FDR's 472. At that point Roosevelt embarked upon the most successful economic recovery plan in the history of the United States, the New Deal, meant to lift the country out of the Depression that decades of unregulated right-wing economic policies had caused.

When Roosevelt ran for re-election in 1936, his opponent, Kansas Governor Alf Landon, a tax cuttin' anti labor union fanatic, only managed to win two states, Maine and Vermont (8 electoral votes). He even lost Kansas. FDR's 523 electoral votes also saw the Republican Senate caucus drop down 16 members. In the House the GOP managed to hold onto 88 seats (20%). Although Republicans were screaming the same tired anti-working family nonsense then that they're screaming now, the voters, cognizant of their unblemished record of dismal failure, were ignoring them.

In 1940 the GOP candidate, Wendell Wilkie, campaigning on a platform calling the New Deal inefficient and corrupt and not subservient enough to Big Business, led the GOP to another well-earned electoral catastrophe. The only states he won were Maine, Vermont, Michigan, Indiana, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Colorado, for a total of 82 electoral votes (to Roosevelt's 449). Roosevelt's last run, in 1944, was against Thomas Dewey, who wound up with 99 electoral votes (to FDR's 432) after he added "communism" to the charges Wilkie had run on against the New Deal.

My column this week was on this very subject. If you’ve not yet seen this great video of MSNBC's David Shuster and Newsweek's Jonathan Alter discussing right-wing attacks on the New Deal, check it out:

http://mediamatters.org/countyfair/200902100016?show=1


U.S. Rep. Austria blames Depression on Roosevelt
Tuesday, February 10, 2009 7:36 AM

DispatchPolitics

U.S. Rep. Steve Austria said he supports a scaled-down federal economic-stimulus proposal, but the Beavercreek Republican told The Dispatch editorial board that the huge influx of money into the economy could have a negative effect.

"When (President Franklin) Roosevelt did this, he put our country into a Great Depression," Austria said. "He tried to borrow and spend, he tried to use the Keynesian approach, and our country ended up in a Great Depression. That's just history."

Most historians date the beginning of the Great Depression at or shortly after the stock-market crash of 1929; Roosevelt took office in 1933.



http://www.dispatchpolitics.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2009/02/10/copy/caproos.html?adsec=politics&sid=101

[depakid]

1. Steve Austria R-Ohio

Anyone looking for reasons why Ohio's in such sorry shape need to look no further....

[bdamomma]

2. spinning facts as usual.

stupid man.

[nxylas]

3. Stupid or dishonest?

Republicans have got so used to the M$M's refusal to call them on their lies that they figure they can just say anything and if they repeat the lie often enough, people will believe it.

[Daphne08]

4. K & R

:kick:

I'm sick of watching these Republicans revise history for political gain.

Among other things, it's unethical.

[bdamomma]

5. well the repigs are proving one thing, they are

obstructionists to the end, they are our domestic enemies.