All the evidence points to one simple fact: the economy would have sunk without the New Deal.
In these troubled economic times, passionate discussions often center on the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal. Did FDR and his train of government agencies deal a good hand to millions of Americans?
They did. Roosevelt used the government to provide relief, recovery from the Depression and reform of the economic system. Americans’ quality of life improved.
The New Deal brought relief to most Americans. Voters responded by electing FDR to an unprecedented four terms in good part because of his popular programs…
In a two-part series, Wallace Turbeville will discuss what our economy used to look like, how it’s changed, and what that means for trying to revive the American Dream. In this post, an economic history of the US and the recent failures of our political leaders to ensure economic equality.
When Barack Obama won the presidency, the progressive left was euphoric with the hope promised by his campaign.
After two years of persistent high unemployment, progressives are disillusioned and public opinion has shifted to the right. Mortgage foreclosures still hang over the middle class like the sword of Damocles. Progressives poke at…
What does Wall Street have to do with “The Wire“? Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Tom Ferguson took to the streets of Baltimore with the Real News Network to explain. There, boarded-up buildings and screaming police sirens demonstrate what happens when communities are left on the hook for bankers’ bets turned sour. Ferguson explains how “collateral damage” accumulated when unaffordable loans that were pushed on the people of Baltimore collapsed and brought down the price of houses around them. He points out that without a steady tax base, no one will make loans to the city, which, like many others, is desperate for funds. “It’s really a Catch-22,” says Ferguson.
What the people of “The Wire” really need are New Deal programs, he proposes. The administration should “move vigorously to put people back to work. You should have seen cranes and construction stuff everywhere. Obama should have revived the CCC and other programs to get us back to full employment — because that’s the only real panacea to get us out of crisis”, he says.
And where is Wall Street now? “The invisible hand is just waving goodbye,” quips Ferguson. Watch the full interview:
Roosevelt historian David Woolner shines a light on today’s issues with lessons from the past.
By the time Franklin Roosevelt took office in March of 1933, America’s schools, teachers and students had suffered enormously from the Great Depression. Things were so bad, for example, that at one point the State of Georgia was forced to shut down its entire school system and lay off virtually all its teachers. Many rural schools in other parts of the country were also forced to close their doors. In New York City, it is estimated that twenty percent of the student population was suffering from…
The New Deal’s mortgage relief program offers an effective alternative to the Obama administration’s failed strategy.
Continued high unemployment is unfortunately not the only bad piece of economic news that the nation has had to face this summer. It now appears as if the level of home foreclosures will continue at an alarming pace, with many economists now predicting that the number of Americans likely to lose their homes in 2010 will exceed one million — a figure that would surpass the more than 900,000 homes lost to foreclosure in 2009.
With so many homes at risk, the current housing crisis certainly rivals…
New Attacks on FDR’s New Deal Fueled by Old - and Discredited - Ideology
If the US government had a dollar every time someone proclaimed to learn the lessons of the Great Depression, we probably wouldn’t have a budget deficit. Usually, these debates turn on the question of fiscal policy and whether in fact, FDR’s New Deal had a discernable role in generating recovery. “Fiscal austerians” have done much to dismiss the economic achievements of the New Deal, some even suggesting that FDR’s fiscal policies worsened the crisis.
For a brief period during 2008, the views of neo-liberals like Alan Greenspan and…
[Note: This is an updated version of an entry that was originally published on October 2, 2009.]
“Black people were among the major victims of the New Deal. Large numbers of blacks were unskilled and held entry-level jobs, and when New Deal policies forced wage rates above market levels, hundreds of thousands of these jobs were destroyed. ”
Why is Jim Powell a Deal Breaker?
Jim Powell is not only a senior fellow at the pro-free market, libertarian think tank The Cato Institute, but he is also the policy advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation, a libertarian advocacy group founded…
Marshall Auerback presents an alternative to free market ideology for Frum & Co.
Amongst conservatives, David Frum has the great virtue of intellectual honesty, which is why he is generally persona non grata amongst those seeking to curry favor with the Tea Party movement. But he’s right: “For those of us on the free-market side of the debate, the question is even more haunting: What’s our countervailing idea? And if our countervailing idea is tax cuts, what is our reply to the obvious rebuttal that the Bush tax cuts have been in effect through the whole of this crisis, seemingly…
Artists can change hearts and minds, and the government can transform lives. But sometimes it takes a radical approach.
Summer, 1936. The Depression rages. Journalist James Agee and photographer Walker Evans road-trip down to Alabama to produce an article for Fortune magazine on the plight of white sharecroppers. They come out of America’s agricultural netherworld with one of the most influential books of the 20th century, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
This book — as startling and vivid today as it was then — plunges readers headlong into the lives of three families condemned to debt and hunger by a system that…
Defeatist political attitudes be damned. America needs bipartisan reconciliation and perseverance to escape the doldrums of recession.
Americans have always been known to have a “can-do” spirit. During the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration tried out many different programs to confront the Great Depression and to spread rural electrification and support agriculture. Nowadays, however, much of the political spectrum seems to have turned to a “can’t do” spirit. The sequence is often the following: Left-of-center ideas are proposed to solve some long-term, gigantic problem. The Right says that the government can’t implement the idea because if the market had liked the idea it…
What is the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933?
The Glass-Steagall Act was introduced during the Great Depression by former Treasury Secretary Sen. Carter Glass (D-VA) and Chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee Rep. Henry B. Steagall (D-AL).
All the evidence points to one simple fact: the economy would have sunk without the New Deal.
The New Deal’s mortgage relief program offers an effective alternative to the Obama administration’s failed strategy.
