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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam who wrote (103134)	2/4/2009 7:50:11 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 544125

It tells us that something was working. No it doesn't, except for such broad meaning of the term "something was working" as to be meaningless. (If you have any economy at all technically something was working, but that tells you nothing). You may wish to argue whether that "something" was FDR's policies or just a matter of the business cycle asserting itself after a prolonged downturn If the normal movement of an economy up from the lowest point of a downturn, is going to be "something was working", then "telling us 'something was working'", is pretty much telling us nothing. but it is misleading to say, as McCardle did, that the economy wasn't doing anything throughout the 30s No it isn't. The net effect in the 30s was pretty much nothing. Its an accurate statement not a misleading one. Recessions rarely have flat bottoms for their whole length, you have ups and downs within the recessions, but after years of FDRs policies being in effect you still hadn't pulled beyond the last high point, and in fact you had an additional downturn. The economy was finally beginning to recover, but higher taxes, tighter money (the fed raised reserve requirements, normally I wouldn't blame that on the president but FDR had more control over such things than most presidents, so he deserves at least some blame for it), FDR pushing through a new tax on "undistributed profits", and new labor policies increased the cost of labor (the National Labor Relations Act passed in 35, but it took time to raise wages, and then time for those pushed up wages to harm employment). Sending the economy back down again. Near the end of the 30s you had a reversal of some of FDRs harmful polices (others like the NRA had already been reversed), combined with increased demand for American goods from countries preparing for WWII (not just for weapons, more machines, equipment, and raw materials, that where important in order to make and/or use weapons at this point, or substitutes for those things as the local economy switched to produce those things). The trajectory was up until FDR was prematurely convinced to raise taxes. Raise taxes and other things. Should FDR get a pass on them? I suppose if you read Megan's point as being something like "the economy was a straight dead flat line throughout the 30s", then your criticism of her has a lot behind it. I don't read it that way. Its more that the economy didn't pull out of the depression in the 30s, at least for most of the 30s (and didn't strongly pull out for ALL of the 30s)