"0"bama another FDR

Barack Obama and the FDR-Great Depression Myth
by Michael Fumento
11/26/2008

The cover of Time magazine has Barack Obama photoshopped into Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous convertible, complete with oval-shaped glasses and cigarette holder held between the teeth. “The NEW New Deal,” The cover reads. Surely many who voted for Obama saw him as potentially the new FDR, the man to lead us out of hard economic times. But they’ve been misled, for even FDR wasn’t FDR. He is a quasi-mythical creature who not only didn’t end the Great Depression but probably greatly prolonged the nation’s economic agony with his New Deal programs and a menagerie of other foolish measures.
Just look at the numbers. Unemployment from 1923 to 1929 averaged a mere 3.3%. In FDR’s first year, 1933, it hit its high point of 24.9%. Joblessness did decline for the next three years to 14.3% in 1936, but that’s still deep in depression territory. Then the next year unemployment actually spiked up and didn’t fall to 1936 levels again until 1941. “By June 1937, writes Marquette University economic historian Gene Smiley in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, “the recovery...was over.”

Even FDR Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau admitted the New Deal had failed. “We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work,” he declared in 1939. “We have never made good on our promises...I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started...And an enormous debt to boot!”

Finally war came to the rescue. America began exporting huge amounts of food and equipment first to Britain and then the Soviets, even as it geared up its own war machine that was practically non-existent in 1940. Joblessness inevitably plummeted as over eight million Americans joined the military in less than two years.

Was it really The New Deal that doubled the GDP from 1939 to 1943 or that slashed unemployment by two-thirds just from 1940 to 1942 and then cut even the 1942 figure by more than half the next year?

The grotesque reality is that it wasn’t an American aristocrat who led us out of the Great Depression but a monstrous Austrian corporal.