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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (464765)	3/18/2009 5:33:23 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1576159

My understanding of what Hoover did is just the opposite of yours: "Remember, Herbert Hoover didn’t have a problem making unpleasant decisions: he had the courage and toughness to slash spending and raise taxes in the face of the Great Depression. Unfortunately, that just made things worse." Hoover increased government spending by better than 50% between 1929 and when FDR was sworn in. That's not chickenfeed. Where is Obama proposing to vastly expand the gov't? ROTFLMAO. I can't believe you said that.

To: tejek who wrote (464765)	3/20/2009 12:43:42 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576159

My understanding of what Hoover did is just the opposite of yours: That's a common false understanding. Perhaps because he had supported lassez-faire policies many years before he became president (but had long since abandoned the idea). What's funny is that your own link supports my point. It quotes the false idea (the only part of the page that you quote in your post), and then demolishes it. ---- From Murray Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression (1972, 233): Federal expenditures rose from $4.2 billion in 1930 [up from $4.0 billion in 1929] to $5.5 billion in 1931–excluding government enterprises it rose from $3.1 billion to $4.4 billion, an enormous 42 per cent increase! …From a modest surplus in 1930, the Federal government thus ran up a huge $2.2 billion deficit in 1931. And so President Hoover, often considered to be a staunch exponent of laissez-faire, had amassed by far the largest peacetime deficit yet known in American history. In one year, the fiscal burden of the Federal government had increased from 5.1 per cent to 7.8 per cent, or from 5.7 per cent to 8.8 per cent of the net private product. The following year, Hoover oversaw a huge tax increase, which led to lower revenues and a decline in federal spending. Yet “While the absolute amount of Federal depredations fell from $5.4 to $4.4 billion in 1932 … GNP, and gross private product, declined far more drastically. …Hence, the percentage of Federal depredation on the gross private product rose from 7.8 per cent in 1931 to 8.3 per cent in 1932…” (256). Franklin Roosevelt condemned Hoover as a spendthrift in the 1932 campaign and promised fiscal responsibility. ----- feeblog.org Also not that the figures are in nominal dollars, and we had deflation in this period, so the same amount of nominal dollars are (in the reverse of the usual pattern) a larger amount of real dollars later on. So the real dollar spending increase from 1930 to 1931 was actually greater than the 42% nominal dollar increase. Where is Obama proposing to vastly expand the gov't? Have you been sleeping for the past several months? Stimulus bill, various bailout bills, a much larger regular budget, trillions of added spending...