It’s an article of faith that running budget deficits during the New Deal helped end the Great Depression. This myth has been demolished countless times, but it hasn’t penetrated to the pundits and pop economists who host cable news-talk shows. In fact, FDR did not run extraordinarily large budget deficits, and J.M. Keynes actually criticized FDR for this. For details see this New York Times article by Price V. Fishback of the University of Arizona and the National Bureau of Economic Research. Fishback writes, “Once we take into account the taxation during the 1930’s, we can see that the budget deficits of the 1930’s and one balanced budget were tiny relative to the size of the problem [reversing the fall in GNP since 1929]."
This point was also made by Jim Powell in FDR’s Folly: “Changes in federal budget deficits didn’t correspond with changes in gross domestic product, and in any case the federal budget deficit at its peak (1936) was only 4.4 percent of the gross domestic product, much too small for a likely cure.” (Emphasis added.)
Cross-posted at "Anything Peaceful."
1 comment:
Sheldon,
The list is long and dreary ... however when you finger FDR, J.M. Keynes et al., of equal stature, I muster up the line from Shakespeare's Scottish Play: "Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it."
It applies equally to all of these venerated poseurs that still seem to gain favor no matter how many times the efficacy of their prescriptions fail. Sheldon, you and so many others ARE in the hands of the controlling intellectual philistines. (The “intellectual” part isn’t necessarily true though; e.g., GWB) There will never be true freedom, liberty, private property and privacy, as long as the likes of “these” individuals and their ilk continue to use and breath the resource of air... Democracy and “its” cornerstone, the VOTE, exhibit continued self-inflicted terminal stupidity of the masses. Freedom in America in particular, is feeling “free and easy” in your harness, as long as the government ALWAYS maintains absolute control of the reins. Frank Chodorov, long ago, once commented to me on a flight when I flew him from Atlanta to New York, “Freedom in America is ... till it isn’t.”
Profoundly stated, “it doesn’t—and never really did exist!” Freedom and liberty are illusions in America and most elsewhere—and nothing more. It is a sad sight to behold.
Regards,
Capt. A.,
A Sovereign Individual
Principality of Monaco
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