Despite my thoughts on FDR and his socialist programs like social security, imagine what private companies could do with that much investment money. I can, a cure for cancer would be a start...
Replies
12
needs to get out more
Just for fun, are you in communication with FDR? Did he supply you with that number?
SoWal Insider
Despite my thoughts on FDR and his socialist programs like social security, imagine what private companies could do with that much investment money. I can, a cure for cancer would be a start...FDR, one of the top 3 Presidents in U.S. history, bad, GW, creator of the worst fiscal and foreign policy nightmare in U.S. history, good.
Beach FanaticAuthor
I'm not Catholic, so I don't speak to dead people. Here's where I got the figure.
http://www.ssa.gov/budget/2007bud.pdf
I used 2006 numbers. $595,931/12=$49.66. I rounded down.
http://www.ssa.gov/budget/2007bud.pdf
I used 2006 numbers. $595,931/12=$49.66. I rounded down.
Beach FanaticAuthor
FDR, one of the top 3 Presidents in U.S. history, bad, GW, creator of the worst fiscal and foreign policy nightmare in U.S. history, good.
Aside from the from on the obvious hyperbole on the worst fiscal and foreign policy nightmare, I take it that you didn't read the book I suggested by Amity Shlaes.
SoWal Expert
I'm not Catholic, so I don't speak to dead people.
Seriously, do you really think like that, or are you just trying to piss people off?
I'm starting to think 30gAy's vodka ad was right on when it showed people in hoods!
Beach FanaticAuthor
Seriously, do you really think like that, or are you just trying to piss people off?
I'm starting to think 30gAy's vodka ad was right on when it showed people in hoods!
It was a joke, but was Mary resurrected? If so, I must have missed that verse.
SoWal Insider
Aside from the from on the obvious hyperbole on the worst fiscal and foreign policy nightmare, I take it that you didn't read the book I suggested by Amity Shlaes.I could not disagree with her viewpoint more that FDR's economic policies were a disaster. FDR came in during the worst economic disaster in our history, 1933, lest you forget. His place in history is secure with Lincoln and Washington. I find it amusing the History Channel has referred to Bush as "not inqusitive". What a huge understatement.
Beach FanaticAuthor
I could not disagree with her viewpoint more that FDR's economic policies were a disaster. FDR came in during the worst economic disaster in our history, 1933, lest you forget. His place in history is secure with Lincoln and Washington. I find it amusing the History Channel has referred to Bush as "not inqusitive". What a huge understatement.
What the History Channel has to say about Bush has nothing to do with FDR's policies. The Great Depression was a failure of the Federal Reserve, not a failure of FDR's evil "big business". If you don't agree with Shlaes, maybe you should pick up FDR's Folly, by Jim Powell. Powell isn't as easy on him. Or you can read anything Friedman had to say on the subject. Or Bernacke. Or any economics professor at The University of Chicago, or Princeton, or Brown, etc. Your opinion of his policies don't really carry much weight.
Beach FanaticAuthor
Here's Powell's comments on his book. FDR's only saving grace was his handling of the war, but you'd probably criticize that since Germany never attacked us and since the Western Front took the focus away from Japan.
Fresh Debate About FDR's New Deal
by Jim Powell
Jim Powell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is author of FDR's Folly, How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression, (Crown Forum, 2003).
It has been 70 years since Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched his New Deal in an effort to banish the Great Depression of the 1930s -- perhaps the most important economic event in American history. The New Deal was controversial then, and it's still controversial, because it failed to resolve the most important problem of the era: chronic unemployment that averaged 17 percent.
Newsweek columnist Robert Samuelson acknowledged that if World War II hadn't come along, America might have stumbled through many more years of double-digit unemployment. Samuelson, however, is among those who give FDR high marks for handling the political crisis of the 1930s, the worst political crisis this country has faced since the Civil War.
But the political crisis was caused by the double-digit unemployment, and in my new book, FDR's Folly, How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (Crown Forum, 2003), I report mounting evidence developed by dozens of economists, at Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Stanford, the University of Chicago, University of Virginia, University of California (Berkeley) and other universities, that double-digit unemployment was prolonged by FDR's own New Deal policies.
How can that be? Consider just a few of FDR's policies. The New Deal tripled federal taxes between 1933 and 1940 -- excise taxes, personal income taxes, inheritance taxes, corporate income taxes, dividend taxes, excess profits taxes all went up, and FDR introduced an undistributed profits tax. A number of New Deal laws, including some 700 industrial cartel codes, made it more expensive for employers to hire people, and this discouraged hiring.
Frequent changes in the tax laws plus FDR's anti-business rhetoric ("economic royalists") discouraged people from making investments essential for growth and jobs. New Deal securities laws made it harder for employers to raise capital. FDR issued antitrust lawsuits against some 150 employers and companies, making it harder for them to focus on business. FDR signed a law ordering the break-up of America's strongest banks, with the lowest failure rates. New Deal farm policies destroyed food -- 10 million acres of crops and 6 million farm animals -- thereby wiping out farm jobs and forcing food prices above market levels for 100 million American consumers. FDR's Folly spells out much more in startling, sometimes hilarious detail.
Robert Bartley, who edited the Wall Street Journal for three decades and is now a commentator, called for a fresh debate about the New Deal. Newspaper publisher Conrad Black, author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Champion of Freedom, responded by claiming that if "workfare" recipients were included among the "employed," then New Deal unemployment rates were lower than the U.S. Department of Labor has reported for decades. Those tempted to agree with Black might listen to jazz great Louis Armstrong's 1940 tune "The WPA" -- referring to FDR's biggest "workfare" program, the Works Progress Administration. Among the memorable lines: "Sleep while you work, rest while you play, lean on your shovel to pass the time away, at the WPA."
There's a fascinating split between economists and political historians about the New Deal. The idea that FDR cured double-digit unemployment, wrote author and commentator Thomas Sowell in a recent column, "was never pervasive among economists, and even J.M. Keynes -- a liberal icon -- criticized some of FDR's policies as hindering recovery from the depression."
Meanwhile, pro-FDR political historians such as James MacGregor Burns, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Frank Freidel, William Leuchtenburg, and Kenneth S. Davis, have focused on the personalities, elections, speeches, "Fireside Chats" and other aspects of the New Deal's political story, disregarding evidence about the economic consequences of New Deal policies. This continues to be the case with younger political historians like Alan Brinkley, author of The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War, who called the New Deal "a bright moment." Disregarding the economic consequences, too, are children's book authors like Joy Hakim, whose recent bestseller Freedom: A History of US includes a glowing account of New Deal heroics.
Aside from FDR's Folly, the only major work mentioning evidence about the economic consequences of the New Deal is by Stanford University political historian David M. Kennedy: his 1999 book Freedom from Fear, winner of a Pulitzer Prize. "Whatever it was," he wrote, the New Deal "was not a recovery program." The New Deal might be gone, but the debate goes on.
Fresh Debate About FDR's New Deal
by Jim Powell
Jim Powell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is author of FDR's Folly, How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression, (Crown Forum, 2003).
It has been 70 years since Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched his New Deal in an effort to banish the Great Depression of the 1930s -- perhaps the most important economic event in American history. The New Deal was controversial then, and it's still controversial, because it failed to resolve the most important problem of the era: chronic unemployment that averaged 17 percent.
Newsweek columnist Robert Samuelson acknowledged that if World War II hadn't come along, America might have stumbled through many more years of double-digit unemployment. Samuelson, however, is among those who give FDR high marks for handling the political crisis of the 1930s, the worst political crisis this country has faced since the Civil War.
But the political crisis was caused by the double-digit unemployment, and in my new book, FDR's Folly, How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (Crown Forum, 2003), I report mounting evidence developed by dozens of economists, at Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Stanford, the University of Chicago, University of Virginia, University of California (Berkeley) and other universities, that double-digit unemployment was prolonged by FDR's own New Deal policies.
How can that be? Consider just a few of FDR's policies. The New Deal tripled federal taxes between 1933 and 1940 -- excise taxes, personal income taxes, inheritance taxes, corporate income taxes, dividend taxes, excess profits taxes all went up, and FDR introduced an undistributed profits tax. A number of New Deal laws, including some 700 industrial cartel codes, made it more expensive for employers to hire people, and this discouraged hiring.
Frequent changes in the tax laws plus FDR's anti-business rhetoric ("economic royalists") discouraged people from making investments essential for growth and jobs. New Deal securities laws made it harder for employers to raise capital. FDR issued antitrust lawsuits against some 150 employers and companies, making it harder for them to focus on business. FDR signed a law ordering the break-up of America's strongest banks, with the lowest failure rates. New Deal farm policies destroyed food -- 10 million acres of crops and 6 million farm animals -- thereby wiping out farm jobs and forcing food prices above market levels for 100 million American consumers. FDR's Folly spells out much more in startling, sometimes hilarious detail.
Robert Bartley, who edited the Wall Street Journal for three decades and is now a commentator, called for a fresh debate about the New Deal. Newspaper publisher Conrad Black, author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Champion of Freedom, responded by claiming that if "workfare" recipients were included among the "employed," then New Deal unemployment rates were lower than the U.S. Department of Labor has reported for decades. Those tempted to agree with Black might listen to jazz great Louis Armstrong's 1940 tune "The WPA" -- referring to FDR's biggest "workfare" program, the Works Progress Administration. Among the memorable lines: "Sleep while you work, rest while you play, lean on your shovel to pass the time away, at the WPA."
There's a fascinating split between economists and political historians about the New Deal. The idea that FDR cured double-digit unemployment, wrote author and commentator Thomas Sowell in a recent column, "was never pervasive among economists, and even J.M. Keynes -- a liberal icon -- criticized some of FDR's policies as hindering recovery from the depression."
Meanwhile, pro-FDR political historians such as James MacGregor Burns, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Frank Freidel, William Leuchtenburg, and Kenneth S. Davis, have focused on the personalities, elections, speeches, "Fireside Chats" and other aspects of the New Deal's political story, disregarding evidence about the economic consequences of New Deal policies. This continues to be the case with younger political historians like Alan Brinkley, author of The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War, who called the New Deal "a bright moment." Disregarding the economic consequences, too, are children's book authors like Joy Hakim, whose recent bestseller Freedom: A History of US includes a glowing account of New Deal heroics.
Aside from FDR's Folly, the only major work mentioning evidence about the economic consequences of the New Deal is by Stanford University political historian David M. Kennedy: his 1999 book Freedom from Fear, winner of a Pulitzer Prize. "Whatever it was," he wrote, the New Deal "was not a recovery program." The New Deal might be gone, but the debate goes on.
Admin
See "Assume The Position 201" on HBO by Robert Wuhl.
Skunky
FDR did build a nice swimming pool at Warm Springs, GA.
Beach Fanatic
Despite my thoughts on FDR and his socialist programs like social security, imagine what private companies could do with that much investment money. I can, a cure for cancer would be a start...
Wait.........aren't you the same idiot who is screaming foul in the "Surgeon General Thread" because Edwards is making broad claims about stem cell research?
And now you are going to cure cancer if we will just do away with FDR's "socialist programs"?
I've already called you a hypocrite once today, so I guess one more time won't hurt.
It's funn to argue with double standards, isn't it 6th?
Checking your forum account
Please wait while we verify your forum account.