Posted January 8th, 2009 at 11.26am in Ongoing Priorities. President-elect Barack Obama wants to blow at least $1 trillion, and probably more, on a New New Deal. Before he does, perhaps we should take a look at the real record of the Old New Deal on unemployment.
[...] an explanation of how massive public-works programs fail to increase overall employment, Heritage Foundation has a clear explanation, via Ed [...]
The greatest tragedy is withering of common sense.
How is unemployment created in a capitalistic society? Our current society is not entirely capitalistic, however.
Nevertheless, unemployment is due to business downturn, lack of productivity growth or due to distortion of the market through government intervention.
How is employment created? Economic growth due to availability of attractive capital to increase productivity. Government revenue is through taxation of that productivity which then dries up capital for further investment.
Government spending eliminates efficient market allocation of capital. It forces capital into unproductive areas. No economic growth and no improvement in employment will result. Government taxation is counter productive to economic growth. Government borrowing will have the same effect. Printing money without any real backing is equally a bad idea. Obama plan will result in a deep depression with worthless dollar. It is basically income redistribution disguised as tax cut.
As I describe here, the numbers in this chart are skewed. First, government labor statistics in the 1930s did not count those employed through government work programs as “employed.” Second, the numbers disagree with Heritage’s own writers — a Dec. 16 piece by Ronald Utt states that in 1940, “America’s unemployment rate stood at 14.6 percent,” but the chart pegs 1940 unemployment at 21 percent.
Curiously, the chart notes non-unemployment-related events — “court-packing”? — but not the reason unemployment went up in 1938: FDR tried to balance the budget by increasing taxes and cutting spending. That would seem to be germane to this discussion.
I do not believe that members of congress have any “common sence”. They can not think past what do I get out of this????
Again, with the myth-building of Leftists/Socialists, such as Franklin Delano. “(Set-up) Pearl Harbor” Roosevelt, Barack Hussein “The One” Obama, and their willing accomplices in government, the courts, academia and the media, the facts don’t count.
Thus also, with them in positions of governmental, judicial, academic, and media control and influence, of course they will only continue to prove that it is fool-hearty to expect their Leftist/Socialist myth-building (and the cancerous consequences of it) to stop as long as they and their Leftist/Socialist “Pied Piper” tunes are followed.
I’d like to see FDR’s New Deal unemployment rates correlated with the number of Democrats elected to Congress. That was the purpose of the New Deal, elect Democrats on the backs of the unemployed. If the unemployed have to suffer for the greater good of greater Democrat majorities, well, so be it. This is also the Obama, Pelosi, Dingy Harry plan.
True! New Dealism “never solved unemployment crisis”, a.k.a. “The Great Depression” (1929-1942).
Indeed such government elitism/Socialism never did and never will solve any such crises (the plural of “crisis”).
Why? Because, for one thing, government basically produces nothing but taxing and spending efforts, and, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, “a tendency to seek to draw all power unto itself” (a.k.a. “regulate” more and more); it takes money, all of which is “tax payer money”, not “government money”, to pay for such efforts and programs, and thus that requires a society of us private citizens who do all of the producing which generates all of the money to pay for it all.
Thus, as history to this day has shown and proven, Socialist/government elitist intrusion and tampering, such as “New Dealism”, etc, only worsens any “crises”, and invariably causes there to be situations such as what FDR and his flunkies found themselves in before the end of 1941, which was that “The Great Depression” had not only “worsened” under such efforts and programs, but it was thus also not “ended”; all the bills for such Socialism were continuing to mount; they finally didn’t want to raise taxes for them any more, for fear of a taxpayer revolt; but then came “the war in Europe and Asia”, wars have solved more than one kind of woe, and so what happened next is viewed by many as having been followed by one heck of a coincidental recovery.
Of course Leftist/Government elitists don’t want us to know this lesson of history, but such facts have a nasty habit of being known and learned anyway.
[...] 5. The New Deal Never Solved the Unemployment Crisis. [...]
[...] excellent piece in the current edition of NRODT, and exhaustive analysis from the Heritage Foundation, make the case that the New Deal suffered from a number of [...]
alone among institutions, the heritage foundation has unemployment at up to 35 per cent during the depression and blames it on FDR. this, of course, is nonsense. but nonsense is all we should expect from the heritage foundation, whose vice president, burton pines, wrote in a 1986 atlantic article that:
“We’re not here to be some kind of Ph.D. committee giving equal time.Our role is to provide conservative public-policy makers with arguments to bolster our side. We’re not troubled over this. There are plenty of think tanks on the other side.”
in other words, heritage says the truth be damned, our job is to promote the republican conservative line, even if we have to lie about it. in fact, unemployment fell as low as 13.9 per cent in 1937 during the depression, although it rose from that point after FDR got scared of spending and cut back on it in the name of budget balancing. And, yes, the nation didn’t fully recover from the depression until WWII, the greatest instance of Federal spending in American history. who says it doesn’t work to stimulate the economy?
Unemployment is a worldwide scenario. Government will have to focus in providing more stable jobs with high cost of salary. I want to help.
Thank You and Good Luck!
January 8, 2009 Bear Creek Ledger » Do You Really Want to Bring Back the Unemployment of FDR’s ’30’s? writes:
[...] Heritage Foundation has the unemployment record from FDR’s New Deal spending [...]