Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RMF who wrote (28255)	5/2/2008 12:12:15 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71588

The WPA wasn't as great as its sometimes made out to be. It served some use, and built some infrastructure, but people just focus on some of the useful things it did, and don't talk much about the less useful things, or the cost. "With good reason, critics often referred to the WPA as "We Piddle Around." In Kentucky, WPA workers catalogued 350 different ways to cook spinach. The agency employed 6,000 "actors" though the nation’s actors’ union claimed only 4,500 members. Hundreds of WPA workers were used to collect campaign contributions for Democratic Party candidates. In Tennessee, WPA workers were fired if they refused to donate two percent of their wages to the incumbent governor. By 1941, only 59 percent of the WPA budget went to paying workers anything at all; the rest was sucked up in administration and overhead. The editors of The New Republic asked, "Has [Roosevelt] the moral stature to admit now that the WPA was a hasty and grandiose political gesture, that it is a wretched failure and should be abolished?"[32] The last of the WPA’s projects was not eliminated until July of 1943." mackinac.org Some of the bank and financial regulation was probably useful, but again much of it is over rated. Maybe you came from a "wealthy family" and Social Security meant nothing to them, but Social Security allowed my Grand Parents to have their own home and live an "independent" retirement. By taking money from other people, and not primarily from the wealthy. The early recipients made out well. Later the benefits where less than you would have gotten investing the same money in safe investments. With the baby boomers starting to retire, and with the longer term demographic problems of increasing life expectancy, and fewer children, its becoming more and more unaffordable. But Social Security isn't why I say FDR was so bad at the economic policy. He raised taxes in a bad economy, he increased regulation in far to many areas, he imposed price controls (and later wage controls but that was a WWII thing not a depression thing), he seized gold from people and arbitrarily revalued the dollar pretty much at random (winding up with a large net devaluation), his first proposed budget of the New Deal era, called for spending 3 1/3 times revenue (a deficit would be acceptable even expected given the economic conditions, but that was rather wild even under the conditions). With a bad economy, and employers struggling to meat payroll, he started a minimum wage that put people out of work, he ordered fields plowed under and livestock destroyed, when many people where hungry. He regulated the price and terms of sales, and had people prosecuted for offering discounts. He supported fascist style economics with the government controlling the economy with all sorts of rules such as those under the NRA (National Recovery Administration) These economic inanities are well described here mackinac.org To be fair to FDR he didn't cause the depression, he just helped prolong it. And he followed Hoover, who also did a horrible job (although not as most people think, by doing nothing, but by doing all sorts of foolish things, many of which FDR continued)