Roscoe Bartlett to Obama: The New Deal didn't work
Wisdom of the ancients:
Said Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md.: "Mr. President, I probably come at this from a slightly different perspective. I remember when FDR beat Hoover in 1932. So I remember the Great Depression very well. I don't remember any of the many government programs affecting the course of the Depression. Government programs didn't work then, I don't know why we think they would work now. Mr. President, I think our obsessive borrowing has fully mortgaged my kids and my grandkids. Now we're working on mortgaging my two great-grandkids. Mr. President, I think it's more than a little bit selfish to try to solve our economic problems which we created by burdening future generations yet to be born."This prompted applause.
H/T The Other McCain--a fellow Marylander BTW
15 comments:
We should send him a thank you card.
Didn't Bartlett say the depression was not that bad. he fails to mention his father got a job in a federal work program that kept food on his family's table and roof over their heads.
Didn't work?
First, what Congressman Bartlett's father did is a non sequitur.
Second, it has been pretty well established that the "New Deal" dragged out a depression into The Great Depression.
The Messiah has said the reason the New Deal did not work was because NOT ENOUGH MONEY WAS SPENT!
Well established?
By whom? Folks who didn't have to feed their families at the time, I am sure.
It may be a non-sequitor to you. It's rather poignient if think about it, just a bit.
Government spending ended the great depression. If you want to know how - please ask and then the powers that be can "allow" it to be published.
by people called "economists", they're sort of like guys who used numbers and stuff rather than running to myObama for advice.
They are also fond of saying "the plural of anecdote is not data" which sort of marginalizes your comments.
WW II ended the Depression. GDP, industrial output, unemployment, all measures of economic activity were static up until 1940 and the well founded decision by Roosevelt to begin building industrial capacity for an inevitable war.
One UCLA study. And to claim it has universal appeal is blown out of proportion.
As a noted Nobel Laurette would tell you.
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/107403/paul_krugman_schools_george_will_on_the_great_depression/
But the question was government spending. What is a war economically, but accelerated government spending and, unfortunately for conservatives, increased taxation.
"The United States entered World War in December of 1941.
So '41 can be treated, in economic terms, as a pre-war year.
In 1941, tax revenues were 7.7% of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and government spending was 12.1% of GDP
Taxes went up. Deficits were disregarded. Government spending zoomed.
By 1944, tax revenues were 21.7% of GDP and government spending accounted for 45.3% of GDP. Almost half.
It was the New Deal without restraint.
It was Keynesian economics on steroids.
It was Roosevelt unleashed."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-beinhart/the-great-depression-the_b_151572.html
You spin those facts anyway you wish. But cheap rhetoric that dismisses the details for the sake of spin doesn't mean much.
Now, FDR's mistake was listening to the conservatives of the day and acting accordingly in the late 1930's. That slowed the growth of economy on the rise for 4 years.
Was the New Deal perfect? No way.
Did it put people to work, feed families and help build a better America? Absolutely.
You argue sanitized numbers? I'll stick with feeding people so that one day they can defend our nation and enter the private sector - when it can put jobs on the table, which was not the case before the New Deal.
The idea "...pretty well established that the "New Deal" dragged out a depression into The Great Depression." is more than misleading.
It's just an overly-simplistic re-write of history without much meaning or fact behind it.
Just idiocy.
treating 1941 as a "non war" year is just anti-historical. The peacetime draft started in mid-1941. The Lend Lease Act took effect in March 1941. If you are historically illiterate that is a compelling argument. If you graduated high school, not so much.
When Roosevelt was elected unemployment stood at 23.6%, at the end of his first year in office it was 24.9.
Between 1937 and 1938 unemployment rose from 14.3 to 19.0 and dropped to 17.2 in 1939.
In 1940 GDP had not reached 1929 levels.
Paul Krugman is a shill. He's noted for being a shill. His area of study is not the Great Depression, it is international trade.
Quoting Huffington Post and "alternet" are like citing Weekly World News. Grow up. Read something not written by a political operative wannabe.
I don't rewrite history. I quote it. If you don't like it retreat to your cloud cuckoo land where you can admire your posters of The One and his unicorns.
"Between 1937 and 1938" is a bogus comparison, and I suspect you know it, as that was the year that FDR decided to tack to the right, abandoning earlier New Deal initiatives in favor of being perceived as a deficit hawk. Which resulted in the wiping out of the gains that had been made from 1933-37, which you conveniently ignore.
Here's the BLS data for the years 1930-42.
Stop barfing up lame talking points from Fox News, especially when they were discredited weeks ago. As I've noted previously, you really are losing it. Sad.
I equate The One with Dr Hansen (NASA) the Global Warming initiator.
In Hansen's case, to get more people to hear him out, he broke company policies and screamed the sky is falling as loud as he can.
In The One's case, to get more people to think we don't have quite the same problem as the Depression of the '30's (& what led up to it) - he says bigger quantities of cheaper money will solve all our problems.
Both are idiots to the extreme.
actually it isn't. There was no "abandonment" of the communist bent of the New Deal in that year. That data point is important because is demonstrates that there was no straight line from 24% to 17%.
I'd rather quote "FoxNews" (which I haven't) than admit I've ever read alternet or quote PuffHo.
Streiff, what are you talking about? The unemployment number went down every year from 1933 to 1941 except for one, and you want to harp on that one. I gave you a reason why that happened, and your response is gibberish ("communist"? Good lord).
Just for those who don't want to click the link, here's the year by year data from 1933 to 1941.
1933 24.9
1934 21.7
1935 20.1
1936 17.0
1937 14.3
1938 19.0
1939 17.2
1940 14.6
1941 9.9
Roosevelt the Commie was president for all of this time. The unemployment number went from 24.9% to 9.9% BEFORE THE WAR. And please don't start with Lend Lease or the draft, which had no effect on this particular economic indicator in the short run. The first actual Lend Lease transactions weren't until October, 1941.
So tell me again how reducing unemployment from 24.9% to 9.9% was ineffective. I'm just dying to hear this.
Lend Lease was 1941. Peacetime draft started in 1941. That's why the 1941 unemployment rate dropped.
Pretty simple. Ramping up war production and taking excess men out of the civilian labor force.
Otherwise you're left to explain how the unemployment rate was stuck in the mid- high teens for a decade of these "great" New Deal programs.
Your monocausal analysis also ignores that GDP in 1941 was below 1929. Hardly indicative of an economic policy capable of generating a recovery.
If you'd read your own numbers you could have avoided this tragic self-beclowning.
Oh, great, let's all watch Streiff drag the goalposts across the field.
Dude, you started out by saying that the New Deal didn't work because the unemployment rate went up from 1937 to 1938. I pointed out, with data from the Bureau of Labor statistics, that your focus on those particular years was rather self-serving. Your response was to tell me there was "no straight line from 24% to 17%." I then cited the data from 1933 to 1941, showing that with one exception (1937-38) there WAS a straight line.
Having been negated at each step of our little dance, you then decide that unemployment isn't anywhere near as important as GDP. Move those goalposts, young man, move them faster!
And you call me a clown? To think that I used to regard you as one of the few RS/RM people worth having a conversation with. Sigh.
Whatever the merits of what you righties so delightfully used to call BDS, it was never as widespread as you claimed and it took several years to set in. We're one week into the Obama Administration and the infection of ODS is already raging across the country like wildfire, and it seems to have hit you particularly hard. Call me after you get the antidote, OK? Maybe we can have an actual conversation then.
Lefty is using a BLS data set that includes the New Deal temporary make work jobs i.e. political jobs, not actual real created jobs from a resurgent economy. Amity Shlaes book The Forgotten Man uses Stanley Lebergott's more authoritative data set that eliminates these jobs. So lefty you prove yourself ignorant, as always.
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