The captions are easier to read after clicking on it to enlarge the image.
Obama considers himself a new FDR, so the parallel is apt. FDR and his Democrat House and Senate took over the economy, making the Depression last until WWII ended it. Thomas Sowell, my favorite economist, has pointed this out in his columns.
By raising taxes and putting government funds into enormous projects and social prgrams, FDR took money away from the private sector that would have fueled a real recovery. In addition, a clever PR campaign put all the blame for the continuing Depression on Hoover and the Republicans.
A hope-filled stockbroker tried to tell me that FDR's measures eventually worked. I said, "They didn't work for 10 years. The Depression got worse. WWII ended the Depression."
7 comments:
I'd argue the first Great Depression didn't end until after WWII.
Conclusion. The governmental response to the 1921 economic downturn shows what happens when ailing economies are allowed to heal free of government help. Conversely, the federal government’s 1933 compounding of past legislative mistakes shows how ineffective government spending is when it comes to jumpstarting an economy that is unproductive.
http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2009/06/world_war_ii_did_not_end_the_g.html
I'd add that I disagree with the author's insistence that the war distracted the govt from further meddling in the economy. Enslaving several million men to send them overseas to remove them from the domestic labor pool is quite the shock to the system. Ditto to labor and price controls.
War does not cure economic illness. Ludwig von Mises puts it this way: "War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings."
{I'm not try to inflate the comments here artificially. The prior two are mine. I'm adding them as I find interesting snips.}
"As the Austrian economic [school of thought] historian Robert Higgs has shown, the economy did not begin to recover from GD-1 until after the war had ended, and Roosevelt had died. During the war, with price controls and rationing, the public’s economic well-being deteriorated. Spending for civilian consumer goods declined through 1941–1943 and was still below the 1941 level when the war ended. People spent a lot of time in lines trying to purchase things. The quality of consumer goods deteriorated. Rationing of tires and gasoline limited where people could go. After the war, Federal spending contracted by two-thirds, freeing up money for businesses to invest for civilian purposes. And with a less threatening Harry Truman now president, investors became more sanguine about the security of their property and went back into the market."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/miller/miller29.html
What caused the Great Depression was the non-regulation of the stock market, which caused the banks to fail. The depression was caused by allowing all the banks to fail. The Republican's Darwinian laws of the jungle don't work well when it comes to the economy, or downright anything, I'd venture. Right now, if many banks hadn't been propped up by the feds, we'd be in the Depression again, Round Two.
The Federal Reserve is the sham that caused the depression, then and now. The international bankers clean up as the result of depression.
". . .projects and social prgrams, FDR took. . ."
Ths is not the fist missspeeling; Ikabod I hav, scene meny other. I do n't licke the dubel standerd.
I thought Mozilla Firefox has a "spell checking guide."
Please argue the issues. I believe in your right to debate, however, not when you constantly point out the grammar mistakes.
A WELS Reader Not Necessarily an Ichabod Follower
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