Get Over It: New Deal Didn't Do the Job
by William W. Beach and Ken McIntyre
by William W. Beach and Ken McIntyre
"We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work."
Sound like Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, or perhaps another exasperated Republican stalwart, lamenting President Barack Obama's inclination this week to try to spend our way out of the recession?
Listen again:
"I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises."
Sound more like a liberal Democrat -- say, Harlem's Rep. Charlie Rangel -- pushing Obama to "create" jobs?
How about this:
"I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. ... And an enormous debt to boot!"
Surely this must be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi denouncing the Bush administration's economic policies.
Wrong. Wrong. And wrong again.
The words came from none other than Henry Morgenthau Jr. -- pal, lunch companion and loyal secretary of the Treasury to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Morgenthau made this "startling confession," as historian Burton W. Folsom Jr. calls it, during the seventh year of the New Deal he helped FDR create to combat the rampant unemployment of the Great Depression.
It was May 9, 1939, and Morgenthau was appearing before powerful Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee.
"In these words, Morgenthau summarized a decade of disaster, especially during the years Roosevelt was in power. Indeed average unemployment for the whole year in 1939 would be higher than that in 1931, the year before Roosevelt captured the presidency from Herbert Hoover," Folsom writes in his new book,"New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America."
Indeed, Morgenthau confessed what so many keepers of FDR's flame won't admit: The New Deal failed. Massive spending on public works programs didn't erase historic unemployment. It didn't produce a recovery.
And neither will a "new" New Deal.
Sound like Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, or perhaps another exasperated Republican stalwart, lamenting President Barack Obama's inclination this week to try to spend our way out of the recession?
Listen again:
"I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises."
Sound more like a liberal Democrat -- say, Harlem's Rep. Charlie Rangel -- pushing Obama to "create" jobs?
How about this:
"I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. ... And an enormous debt to boot!"
Surely this must be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi denouncing the Bush administration's economic policies.
Wrong. Wrong. And wrong again.
The words came from none other than Henry Morgenthau Jr. -- pal, lunch companion and loyal secretary of the Treasury to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Morgenthau made this "startling confession," as historian Burton W. Folsom Jr. calls it, during the seventh year of the New Deal he helped FDR create to combat the rampant unemployment of the Great Depression.
It was May 9, 1939, and Morgenthau was appearing before powerful Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee.
"In these words, Morgenthau summarized a decade of disaster, especially during the years Roosevelt was in power. Indeed average unemployment for the whole year in 1939 would be higher than that in 1931, the year before Roosevelt captured the presidency from Herbert Hoover," Folsom writes in his new book,"New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America."
Indeed, Morgenthau confessed what so many keepers of FDR's flame won't admit: The New Deal failed. Massive spending on public works programs didn't erase historic unemployment. It didn't produce a recovery.
And neither will a "new" New Deal.
