To: NJ @ 6:25 PM 10/5:

Hoover’s real mistake was propping up wages and prices. This priced people, goods, and services out of the market, worsening and prolonging the depression. If Hoover had been a “do-nothing” President like some people claim, things would not have been nearly as bad.

And are you saying tax policy has a bigger effect on bubbles and busts than the Federal Reserve?

N.J, You put such effort into your Left/Right, Republican/Democrat paradigm. It really is amazing you go to such detailed effort in support of what is, in reality, fascism.

I’d love to see you get together with a group of Austrians, who will be the first to reject your paradigm and in the end, tear you to pieces.

No one would reelect anyone who was “prolonging” their economic hardship.

Nothing Republican could do could convince the electorate of the nonsense that conservatives are trying to shovel today.

1929 (pre depression) 3.14

1930 8.67

1931 15.82

1932 23.53

FDR becomes president March 21, 1933

1933 24.75

1934 21.60

1935 19.97

1936 16.80

1937 14.18

1938 18.91

1939 17.05 World War II BEGINS…

1940 14.45

1941 9.66

U.S. enters WWII.

The facts bear out that every year Republicans were in charge, simply by allowing the “FREE MARKET” to operate and keeping government out of the economy, the result was catastrophic. Unemployment increased by 250 percent between 1929 and 1930, by almost 200 percent between 1930 and 1931, by fifty percent in between 1932 and FDR’s inauguration.

Under FDR Unemployment drops consistantly every year, and GDP enters positive territory after his first year. In most economic theory, you will not see unemployment reverse itself to pre depression levels until you make up all the GDP losses that occurred in the collapse. So FDR had to bring back the 25 percent of GDP that Republicans lost before job creation would replace all the Republican created losses.

The GOP should be proud.

That is where Rush and Sean are caught with their pants down. They only cited the part of the study they wanted to, not the actual facts. The original study faults FDR for NOT fully adopting Keynesian ideas and worrying too much about balancing the budget. Basically the study called for MORE New Deal not less.

They make up sentences like “Those wiggly lines on the charts” when the wiggly lines do not EXIST after 1933. The economy starts recovering and moving up every year, consistantly, as soon as conservative economic ideas are abandoned for the tripe they were, and the tripe they always are.

When examining the statistics and economic data with regard to the Depression, what ends up occurring without the New Deal is a Depression that would have lasted 10 -15 years longer than it did.

It would have ended sometime in the mid 1950’s without the New Deal. Some estimates place it as taking until 1960 for the Depression to have ended without the New Deal.

Republicans repeat that revisionist history of the New Deal but NONE have ever provided a single FACT to back it up. They simply assert that had FDR done nothing, the economy would have gotten better on its own. But no economist has ever been able to do more than simply make assertions. Historically what we have is from September 1929-March of 1933, a perfect picture of what Republican economic theory does in a recession. Turns it into a depression. In fact we have proof that Republican tax policies of the first half of the 1920’s creating the market bubble of the last half of the 1920’s which cause the collapse of the speculative land investments which kicked off the market crash of 1929, which started the Depression. Stocks were being purchased based on credit given on the value of land owned by the investors. When the price of the land collapsed, their ability to pay the loans they took out to buy stock collapsed. Banks did not get paid back, the values of stocks collapsed. The perfect Republican theory disaster.

On the other hand, every year under FDR was better. The depression was OVER before WWII started. The market was in positive territory and that, not unemployment is the leading indicator. Once GDP enters positive territory, jobs then follow. The fact is that even without WWII the economy was recovering and well on the way to job creation and the economy would have been fine without WWII.