Ken Burns's The Roosevelts: An Intimate History

[mamooth]

Numbers of unemployed.
1933: 12.8 million
1939: 9.2 million

'Nuff said. The New Deal worked. Roosevelt took office in 1933, so PC is engaging in some deliberate statistical trickery by using 1931 as a starting benchmark.

There was a second lesser economic downturn in 1937-1938. Right after several New Deal jobs programs were drastically cut. Go fig.

I think the funniest part is how the anti-Keynesians say jobs programs didn't work, but WWII did. Except WWII was, as seen by the economy, a huge jobs program. Apparently government spending to build bombs creates jobs, but government spending to build permanent infrastructure doesn't.

 

[Vandalshandle]

I have not seen Burns work on the Roosevelt's yet, but, I am reading "The Empirial Cruise", by James Bradley. I have always admire TR, but this book is a SERIOUS eye opener. His racism was extreme, although it was not far from the norm of those days. He shared responsibility with Hearst for starting the Spanish American war, and was directly responsible for sewing the seeds for Pearl Harbor in 1941. The worst revelation was the atrocities that the US committed against the Pilipino, including an unprovoked attack that killed more of them than Americans who died on Dec. 7, 1941. We not only used waterboarding against the Pilipino freedom fighters, the army had a marching song about it. We broke just about every agreement that we made with the Cubans and the Pilipino. We tortured and killed the Pilipino, men, women, and children. Rape by US soldiers was actually encouraged.