The Red and Black

Originally posted by

Winslo

I WILL BE SO GLAD WHEN YOU GRADUATE.

Winslo must mean that Zaid Jilani is going to change the world as soon as he graduates! I can't wait for that, either.

Originally posted by

Patrick

I believe it was in fact the War that brought us out of the GD, not the New Deal. But to a bed-wetting liberal like Zaid, the Government is always the answer.

I CAN wait until he graduates. I always read his articles, and though they often are idiotic and make me angry, they do at least entertain for a brief period of time.

Unemployment dropped significantly before the war, and had the New Deal not been scaled back, it would've dropped to pre-Depression levels.

As Paul Krugman debunks this (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/opinion/10krugman.html?hp):

"That said, F.D.R. did not, in fact, manage to engineer a full economic recovery during his first two terms. This failure is often cited as evidence against Keynesian economics, which says that increased public spending can get a stalled economy moving. But the definitive study of fiscal policy in the '30s, by the M.I.T. economist E. Cary Brown, reached a very different conclusion: fiscal stimulus was unsuccessful "not because it does not work, but because it was not tried."

This may seem hard to believe. The New Deal famously placed millions of Americans on the public payroll via the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. To this day we drive on W.P.A.-builtroads and send our children to W.P.A.-built schools. Didn't all these public works amount to a major fiscal stimulus?

Well, it wasn't as major as you might think. The effects of federal public works spending were largely offset by other factors, notably a large tax increase, enacted by Herbert Hoover, whose full effects weren't felt until his successor took office. Also, expansionary policy at the federal level was undercut by spending cuts and tax increases at the state and local level.

And F.D.R. wasn't just reluctant to pursue an all-out fiscal expansion -- he was eager to return to conservative budget principles. That eagerness almost destroyed his legacy. After winning a smashing election victory in 1936, the Roosevelt administration cut spending and raised taxes, precipitating an economic relapse that drove the unemployment rate back into double digits and led to a major defeat in the 1938 midterm elections.

What saved the economy, and the New Deal, was the enormous public works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy's needs."

But what does he know, he's only a Nobel Laureate in Economics.

Second, it's important to note the New Deal wasn't just public works programs, it also introduced the FDIC (why do you think we're not in a depression right now?) and strict regulations on bank mergers and speculations (which were unfortunately were repealed in the 1990's, leading to the problem we're in now).

Let's drop the stupid memes if we can't back them up, k?

"

Originally posted by

Patrick

I believe it was in fact the War that brought us out of the GD, not the New Deal. But to a bed-wetting liberal like Zaid, the Government is always the answer.

I CAN wait until he graduates. I always read his articles, and though they often are idiotic and make me angry, they do at least entertain for a brief period of time.

To you that says my comment was a stupid meme, I am kind of confused. I think you disagreed with what I said about WWII bringing the country out of the great depression. But the article you posted supports my theory. Just read the very last sentence of the article: "What saved the economy, and the New Deal, was the enormous public works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy's needs".

Originally posted by

Patrick

I believe it was in fact the War that brought us out of the GD, not the New Deal. But to a bed-wetting liberal like Zaid, the Government is always the answer.

I CAN wait until he graduates. I always read his articles, and though they often are idiotic and make me angry, they do at least entertain for a brief period of time.

I guess Zaid skipped Econ 2200, history of American Economics, or maybe he just got the question wrong on the final "What ACTUALLY lifted America out of the Great Depression?" Not FDR's New Deal... but World War II. Zaid needs an intellectual bailout.