Someone is going to have to make tough choices. It won't be Democrats. Probably not Republicans either. Think Greece...
Yup, FDR did such a great job... all the states & congress passed the 22'nd amendment... just as soon as he was buried. FDR was a good war leader, but an economic ignoramus. (even worse than Obama, who flunked basic Econ at Harvard). But even FDR would be appalled at the debt we've accumulated (15 T)... let alone the debt we've promised (>100T). Truman was deathly afraid he might not be able to finish the war (in the Pacific) because our debt had grown so large (the same ratio to GDP that we are now ). Our current president... doesn't seem the least bit concerned. If you read speeches today by JFK, RFK & Hubert Humphrey, they all sound like conservatives. That's how far left we've moved in the last 50 years.
Wait - I thought Obama has refused to release his college transcripts?! You guys really have to get your conspiracy stories straight.
FDR beats every single Republican President of the last century in GDP growth and stock market performance. He turned around the Depression almost immediately and stopped a massive bank run with little more than his force of personality. When you are completely ignorant on a topic, it is best to just keep quiet about it.
Can't get around FDR's job creation figures that blew away Obama's. FDR was all about creating jobs first, infrastructure second. Obama went the wrong way on much of this supporting projects that used little labor as a percentage of overall cost. Unemployment (% labor force)Year Lebergott Darby[100] 1933 24.9 20.6 1934 21.7 16.0 1935 20.1 14.2 1936 16.9 9.9 1937 14.3 9.1 1938 19.0 12.5 1939 17.2 11.3 1940 14.6 9.5
That's cute, but it's two different economies. The WPA couldn't work today because you don't need 3 million people digging ditches for road construction. Now that you seem to be in favor of gov't sponsored job stimulus, call your GOP friends and tell them its the next cool thing. Sent from my MB860 using Tapatalk
We need people cleaning bedpans, performing urban renewal, manning call centers, home renovations for the elderly, etc. Habitat for Humanity types of initiatives, low cost housing for the homeless, performing job training, etc I can think of 1000 things a well run stimulus program could have done that was more labor intensive. Paint, paint and more paint! Job Creation by President (wikipedia). Big loser: Hoover. -.5.41% per year. Next up: Barrack Obama: -.28% through January 2012 The Big Winner: FDR first term 4.97% a year. FDR increased jobs 22% in his first term. That woud be 26 millon for Obama not the 2.25 million saved or created by Obama Stimulus. See liberal ecconomist Paul Krugman on Obama's mishandling of the stimulus money. "Not quite shovel ready" was an understatement. Job creation stimulates the economy and full employment drives up all wages. That's good! Purchasing bridges built in China and shipped to the US? Bad.
So tell me... why did everyone move as fast as they could... to pass the 22'nd amendment? "Turned around the depression" ? What frickin' history books are you reading? We didn't get back to a healthy economy until after WW-2 in 1947-50. The 30's were a black hole. Read some history. You might learn something... A wide-ranging historical overview of the many mistakes FDR made: Great Myths of the Great Depression Burton Folsom - New Deal or Raw Deal? Another look at the new deal. The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression FDR’s Biggest Mistake During the Depression "... FDR didn’t know what to do about the Great Depression he inherited from Herbert Hoover, so he tried everything. He hiked taxes, spent more money, established monopolies, enforced cartels, filed antitrust lawsuits, promoted compulsory unionism, multiplied business regulations, denounced investors, and started welfare programs, public works projects, a big entitlement, on and on. One theme runs through such misguided policies: the failure to focus single-mindedly on the recovery of the private sector that pays all the bills, including tax bills. FDR was very much a creature of the “progressive” era, when many intellectuals embraced the view that experts could make a better world if only they had enough power. Some of FDR’s New Dealers were impressed by Mussolini’s fascist corporate state model, others liked Stalin’s centralized economic planning in the Soviet Union, and still others just seemed to believe that any problem could be fixed by issuing more laws and regulations. With very few exceptions, New Deal discussions weren’t about helping the private sector recover. Discussions were about making government bigger. Whatever gave “progressive” intellectuals the idea that government could run an economy? History is littered with government failures. During the 19th century, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia built canals with taxpayers’ money. Almost all were losers. State governments lost money in railroads. Economic historian Clifford Thies noted that “turnpikes were also money-losers.” Economic historians Ernest L. Bogart and Donald L. Kemmerer observed that “Most of the enterprises were extravagantly, if not corruptly, managed.” Desperate to pay their debts, states raised taxes and unloaded assets as fast as they could. Altogether, nine state governments — a third of all states — that had spent large sums on all sorts of business ventures defaulted on their debts during the 1840s. Many state constitutions were amended to make sure such disasters didn’t happen again. A couple decades later, Washington politicians tried their hand at business by subsidizing construction of the transcontinental railroad. In 1872, this exploded into the biggest American financial scandal of the 19th century. Principals of Credit Mobilier pocketed millions of dollars of subsidies, bribed congressmen, and brought on the collapse of the Union Pacific Railroad. During the late 19th century, a number of western states tried to increase their populations and political clout by attracting people willing to farm in the desert — the most costly kind of farming imaginable. States issued bonds to finance dams and reservoirs for irrigation. Result: lots of corruption and waste...."
