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Post on February 6, 2009 by 2 Comments »

One of the strategies of the anti-government right in the debate about the stimulus package and economic recovery strategies is to discredit the New Deal. They claim that FDR made the economy worse, not better, and even though it sounds like something from the bizarro world on Seinfeld, some media outlets have actually taken seriously the efforts to distort history, or at least allowed them to be presented without anyone having to justify the ludicrous claims.

Charles McMillion with the Campaign for America’s future has a good summary of the attempt to twist the historical record and a few simple facts that show how ridiculous it is.

Here are a few of his points.

The monthly data for Industrial production show a near three-year collapse under President Hoover, ending when FDR came to office in March 1933. Production rocketed by 44 percent in the first three months of the New Deal and, by December 1936, had completely recovered to surpass its 1929 peak.

After-tax personal income, consumer spending, real private investment and jobs all reached or surpassed their 1929 peaks by late 1936.

FDR, always a fiscal conservative, mistakenly thought the economy had become self-sustaining and slashed public spending programs to balance the budget…

When the economy again contracted sharply in late 1937 and early 1938, FDR quickly reversed course and rapid growth immediately began again. GDP soared by 10.9 percent in 1939 and industrial production soared by 23 percent

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Comments (Closed):2

  1. Rob Schofield
    February 6, 2009 at 7:55 am

    What’s so ironic about the knee jerk the anti-New Deal attitudes of the modern right-wingersis their failure to understand that it was FDR who quite arguably saved American capitalism. What these neo-Hooverites fail to remember is that the U.S. government and economy were quite arguably on the brink of total collapse in 1933. It was the New Deal stimulus policies that restored confidence and got the market economy moving again at a time when a lot of people were saying its time had come and gone.

  2. Jeffrey Sykes
    February 8, 2009 at 11:35 pm

    This post quite honestly ignores the realities of economic and historical debate, critical to a democracy, and attempts to find the blissful truth of what is in reality a most complex series of interlocking national and international, diplomatic, economic and political considerations.

    Fully more than one-quarter of all historians and economists hold a critical view of the New Deal. So there really are no “efforts to distort history”. Instead there is intellectual debate.