UCLA: FDR Prolonged the Depression

[Skull Pilot]

That was part of it. It wasn't all of it.



As the President, he gets credit for everything that happens or fails to happen in this country. FDR was in office when the depression started and was in office when the depression ended. He was so enormously popular that he was elected by the American people four times. Obviously the people who really matter, those who lived through the matter have a different opinion.

It's funny watching you guys constantly trying to bash FDR's tangible accomplishments. It's silly.

It's funny that people are still blaming bush too then. Especially if the president gets the credit (blame) for everything that happens while he is in office.

Bush is still relevant as we are still early in the Obama administration and he was the last guy that held the office for 8 years.

That being said, Obama is in charge now and he can't make a habit out of blaming Bush. However, it's totally appropriate to point out that Bush's mismanagement of Afghanistan is part of the reason we have problems there today.

Ah so you like to have it both ways.

typical libby.

 

[geauxtohell]

You know the definition of a Convention of Economists, PC?

It's a room with filled with 500 men with watches, NONE of whom can give you the correct time.

So an economist at UCLA thinks FDR made the depression worse? I certainly do not doubt that. And there's probably another UCLA economist in the same department who completely disagrees, too

If these economist (all of them) actually KNEW how economies worked, don't you think they'd ALL already be billionaires?

Economics is NOT chemistry, it's not physics, it's not mechanical sciences. It's NOT a hard science, its a SOCIAL science (with a lot of highly dubious numbers)

If economics was the kind of science that could make pronouncments that could be duplicated in a lab by other economists, then our economy wouldn't be the mess it is.

Economist are more like historians than accounts, dude.

Accountants can have any other accountant come to the exact same conclusion if they have the same books.

Economist can't even agree what the numbers are, let along what they mean.

Exactly. Economics (while being a wonderful field of study) is inherently a soft science. If you run a chemical reaction, the results are predictable every time. You should be able to crunch the numbers prior to the reaction and predict how much product you will yield. Failure to yield that product means your methodology was wrong. Economics? No so much.

Like I said, it might make for an interested academic debate. It doesn't mean much in the greater scheme of things.

 

[geauxtohell]

It's funny that people are still blaming bush too then. Especially if the president gets the credit (blame) for everything that happens while he is in office.

Bush is still relevant as we are still early in the Obama administration and he was the last guy that held the office for 8 years.

That being said, Obama is in charge now and he can't make a habit out of blaming Bush. However, it's totally appropriate to point out that Bush's mismanagement of Afghanistan is part of the reason we have problems there today.

Ah so you like to have it both ways.

typical libby.

Uh no. If you can't get the importance of time to this matter than it's no wonder you were lost.

Here's a good point: Clinton could have done more to get Bin Ladin. So he shares some culpability in 9-11 that happened under his immediate predecessor. The bulk of the matter is still on W., who was in office at the time.

FDR, on the other hand, can't be blamed for the matter.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

We've had 18 months of 10% unemployment.

Imagine if unemployment were nearly twice as bad and lasted 6 1/2 more years: that's FDR.

FDR: worst economy in human history, eclipsing the 7 Biblical Lean Years.

 

[Greenbeard]

Too bad the only way FDR got us out of the depression was WWII.

Out of curiosity, what economic factors associated with World War II do you credit with ending the depression? Budget-balancing and a reliance on laissez faire capitalism?

 

[PoliticalChic]

Either you didn't read the article, or you didn't understand it.

I have my suspicions.

To the point, 'FDR got us out of the depression,' this may be more your speed:

Mark Steyn presciently noted, in late October of 2008, other nations had economic Depressions at the start of the 1930s; the US had a Great Depression, earning that added sobriquet due to its needless longevity.


BTW, 'sobriquet' means nickname...

Either way, it's irrefutable that FDR got the United States out of the depression. Furthermore, the depression was much more than an economic collapse. It was also a massive drought in the Midwest. Comparing it with other nation's "depressions" is apples and oranges.

With the benefit of retrospect, some economists might project that the New Deal wasn't 100% efficient. That's not surprising. It's also not terribly convincing. Economics is not an exact science and, simply focusing on policy ignores other factors of the presidency, and in the end, the results are all that matters.

FDR was the only person that was willing and able to get us out of the depression. Hoover believed in non-intervention and greatly compounded the problem. The whole "do nothing and the invisible hand of the market will fix it!" mentality had been tried with disastrous results.

"...irrefutable ..."

Very nice word, and certainly an upgrade for you!

Sadly, you don't know what the word means, as the OP does exactly the reverse of the term.

Unless you are ready to deny that the depression lasted longer here, under the FDR policies, than under nations that chose a less ideological fix...

are you?

But, kudos, for the choice of a new avatar. Far more adult...

now if you could only do something about the name...

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Economic is not hard, it's just is taught that way to make Keynesian Economics look believable.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Too bad the only way FDR got us out of the depression was WWII.

Out of curiosity, what economic factors associated with World War II do you credit with ending the depression? Budget-balancing and a reliance on laissez faire capitalism?

Try this on for size.

Your Mo N' Bigga Gubbamint answer to everything is tiring.

The Depression You’ve Never Heard Of: 1920-1921 | The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty

 

[geauxtohell]

"...irrefutable ..."

Very nice word, and certainly an upgrade for you!

Sadly, you don't know what the word means, as the OP does exactly the reverse of the term.

No where in the OP did I see them claim that FDR didn't get us out of the depression. Just that a singular policy extended it by seven years.

Unless you are ready to deny that the depression lasted longer here, under the FDR policies, than under nations that chose a less ideological fix...

I've already pointed out that it's disingenuous to compare a depression at another place and time with our depression. It's akin to comparing different wars. There might be some similarities, but they are different matters. As I noted, the Dust Bowl greatly compounded the depression. In my part of the world, people were leaving the cities to come and squat on our land because they were starving in the cities.

So, as I said, it makes an interesting academic debate. It's not terribly relevant to what happened. In other words, don't expect the history books to be re-written.

But, kudos, for the choice of a new avatar. Far more adult...

now if you could only do something about the name...

Let's stay on topic. Especially since I could care less of your opinion about my avatar or name.

 

[Skull Pilot]

Bush is still relevant as we are still early in the Obama administration and he was the last guy that held the office for 8 years.

That being said, Obama is in charge now and he can't make a habit out of blaming Bush. However, it's totally appropriate to point out that Bush's mismanagement of Afghanistan is part of the reason we have problems there today.

Ah so you like to have it both ways.

typical libby.

Uh no. If you can't get the importance of time to this matter than it's no wonder you were lost.

Here's a good point: Clinton could have done more to get Bin Ladin. So he shares some culpability in 9-11 that happened under his immediate predecessor. The bulk of the matter is still on W., who was in office at the time.

FDR, on the other hand, can't be blamed for the matter.

rationalization is a wonderful thing.

 

[geauxtohell]

rationalization is a wonderful thing.

I'll take that to mean you are pretty much tapped out on this matter.

 

[PoliticalChic]

The study only focuses on NIRA. That is wrong because the New Deal was more than NIRA.

There can be little doubt that NIRA was horrendously bad economics, and probably contributed to a weaker recovery than otherwise would have been, however,

During Roosevelt's first two terms, the U.S. economy grew at average annual growth rates of 9 percent to 10 percent, with the exception of the recession year of 1937-1938. As economist Christina Romer (now director-designate of the Council of Economic Advisers) writes, these rates were "spectacular, even for an economy pulling out of a severe recession."

Thus, at the very least, the New Deal did not prevent a "spectacular" rate of recovery. More, we have reason to believe some of Roosevelt's policies enabled it.

For a start, New Deal intervention saved the banks. During Hoover's presidency, around 20 percent of American banks failed, and, without deposit insurance, one collapse prompted another as savers pulled their money out of the shaky system. When Roosevelt came into office, he ordered the banks closed and audited. A week later, authorities began reopening banks, and deposits returned to vaults.

Congress also established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which, as economists Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz wrote, was "the structural change most conducive to monetary stability since ... the Civil War." After the creation of the FDIC, bank failures almost entirely disappeared. New Dealers also recapitalized banks by buying about a billion dollars of preferred stock. ...

New Deal policies not only made recovery possible but got it going. Roosevelt reduced the dollar's value to $35 per ounce of gold (approximately 60 percent of its former value) and, as Romer notes, overseas investment flooded into the country, attracted by these cheaper dollars and stable banks and pushed, as time went on, out of Europe by Hitler's advance. Along with the flood of investment came an increase of durable-goods expenditures and construction -- and private sector jobs.

The increase of jobs also counts as at least a partial success for the New Deal. Excepting 1937-1938, unemployment fell each year of Roosevelt's first two terms. In part, the jobs came from Washington, which directly employed as many as 3.6 million people to build roads, bridges, ports, airports, stadiums, and schools -- as well as, of course, to paint murals and stage plays. But new jobs also came from the private sector, where manufacturing work increased apace. ...

Still, the New Deal fell far short of perfection. It's quite possible that the economy might have grown even faster than it did and that the 1937-1938 recession might have been averted had Roosevelt avoided some key errors and placed more confidence in fiscal stimulus.

Early on, the New Deal put too much public power in private hands. Conservative critics now focus on the National Recovery Administration, which created government-licensed cartels so that industries could self-regulate. Modern NRA critics have good historical company: Many New Dealers disliked the NRA, and Roosevelt himself eventually admitted it was "pretty wrong." The NRA established boards to set prices, wages, and conditions of work. These boards were supposed to have representatives from management, labor, consumers, and government -- but in practice fewer than 10 percent had labor representatives, even fewer had consumer representatives, and the government representative was normally someone from the ranks of management. One New Dealer noted only two cases when the government enforced codes of behavior on businessmen against their wishes.

As a result, as the historian Andrew Wender Cohen points out, the NRA boards provided legitimacy for businessmen wanting to coerce each other -- as happened when a group of smaller-scale kosher butchers made trouble for the mighty Schechter group -- and generally afforded businessmen an opportunity to collude in price-fixing. Which is why the NRA became unpopular and moribund before the Supreme Court found it unconstitutional early in 1935.

But the case against the NRA is not a case that America would have been better without the New Deal: It is a case that the New Deal would have been better without the NRA -- a position at which many New Dealers had arrived by some time in 1934.

Learning From the New Deal's Mistakes | The American Prospect

Milton Friedman once said that the creation of the FDIC was the single most important policy to end the Depression. Friedman isn't exactly a progressive icon.

Thus, to focus only on NIRA is simply a mistake.

Is this an attempt to change the subject?

Did FDR's policies extend the Depression, or not?

1. In 1931, in some of the darkest days of the Great Depression and the middle of the Hoover administration, unemployment rate stood at 17.4 %. Seven years later, after five years of FDR, and literally hundred s of wildly ambitious new government programs, more than doubling of federal spending, the national unemployment rate stood at – 17.4 %. At no point during the 1930’s did unemployment go below 14 %. Even in 1941, in the midst of the military buildup, 9.9 % of American workers were unemployed.

2. March 4, 1933, in his first Inaugural Address, FDR said “Our greatest primary task is to put people to work.” This meant that the New Deal was a wretched, ill-conceived failure.

3. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., liberal New Deal historian wrote in The National Experience, in 1963, “Though the policies of the Hundred Days had ended despair, they had not produce recovery…” He also wrote honestly about the devastating crash of 1937- in the midst of the “second New Deal” and Roosevelt’s second term. “The collapse in the months after September 1937 was actually more severe than it had been in the first nine months of the depression: national income fell 13 %, payrolls 35 %, durable goods production 50 %, profits 78% .

4. In 1935, the Brookings Institution (left-leaning) delivered a 900-page report on the New Deal and the National Recovery Administration, concluding that “ on the whole it retarded recovery."

5. I'll see your Friedman, and raise you a...

John Maynard Keynes, who, in a letter published in the NYTimes, December 31, 1933, warned “ even wise and necessary Reform may, in some respects, impede and complicate Recovery. For it will upset the confidence of the business world and weaken their existing motives to action.” Even Keynes say the danger in treating the nation’s capitalists as an enemy, as “the unscrupulous money changers,” as FDR called them in his first Inaugural.

 

[Skull Pilot]

rationalization is a wonderful thing.

I'll take that to mean you are pretty much tapped out on this matter.

Not at all.

You stated that the president gets to take all the credit for what happens during his administration. Then you put conditions on that statement after the fact so as to make your original statement more reasonable..

That's called rationalizing.

 

[geauxtohell]

rationalization is a wonderful thing.

I'll take that to mean you are pretty much tapped out on this matter.

Not at all.

You stated that the president gets to take all the credit for what happens during his administration. Then you put conditions on that statement after the fact so as to make your original statement more reasonable..

That's called rationalizing.

So: In your opinion, what degree of culpability does Clinton have for 9-11?

 

[Truthmatters]

Rewriting history to make your failed ideas seem plausible again?


There are people who lived the depression and now they are all nearly dead.

So a couple of right wing hack profs try to go back and rewrite the history toi prop up their failed ideas.


You idiots lapp it up like pablum so you can retain these same failed ideas.

There was a reason Americans adored FDR, that was because they SAW first hand the improvements in their lives during the policies.

Thanks for pissisng on the graves of all these Americans and trying to erase their exsistance for your political hackery.


FUCK YOU PEOPLE.

History has shown over and over again your ideas have failed.

Face the facts and GET SOME NEW IDEAS THAT MIGHT WORK!

 

[PoliticalChic]

FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate

“Roosevelt's role in lifting the nation out of the Great Depression has been so revered that Time magazine readers cited it in 1999 when naming him the 20th century's second-most influential figure.”

1. After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

2. …we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump," said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA's Department of Economics. "We found that a relapse isn't likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies."
3. …Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933….Even after being deemed unconstitutional, Roosevelt's anti-competition policies persisted — albeit under a different guise, the scholars found.

4. "President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by extension reducing employment and demand for goods and services," said Cole, also a UCLA professor of economics. "So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies."

5. Cole and Ohanian calculate that NIRA and its aftermath account for 60 percent of the weak recovery. Without the policies, they contend that the Depression would have ended in 1936 instead of the year when they believe the slump actually ended: 1943.

6. "The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes," Cole said. "Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened."
FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate / UCLA Newsroom

(emphasis mine throughout)

OMG- another liberal icon bites the dust...
we need emergency intervention for our liberal friends!

You know the definition of a Convention of Economists, PC?

It's a room with filled with 500 men with watches, NONE of whom can give you the correct time.

So an economist at UCLA thinks FDR made the depression worse? I certainly do not doubt that. And there's probably another UCLA economist in the same department who completely disagrees, too



If these economist (all of them) actually KNEW how economies worked, don't you think they'd ALL already be billionaires?

Economics is NOT chemistry, it's not physics, it's not mechanical sciences. It's NOT a hard science, its a SOCIAL science (with a lot of highly dubious numbers)

If economics was the kind of science that could make pronouncments that could be duplicated in a lab by other economists, then our economy wouldn't be the mess it is.

Economist are more like historians than accounts, dude.

Accountants can have any other accountant come to the exact same conclusion if they have the same books.

Economist can't even agree what the numbers are, let along what they mean.

Did the depression last longer in the US than in France, for example?

 

[geauxtohell]

So in summary.....

A couple of economists have decided that the "New Deal" wasn't as efficient as it could have been which means that FDR is now a lousy president.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Can you imagine 8 years of 17% average unemployment? The only thing Great about FDR was how he grew the government. That's it! He sucked at everything else.

For years I have been telling mindless FDR was Great Zombies that their Stockholm Syndrome is not my problem and it's good to see a university finally catching on

You know, CF, whenever there is a post with pretty strong anti-lib data or thought, we find no takers from the left.

Understandable...

But I sort of have the feeling that I should kind of smooth out the criticism.

He was, after all the right man for the job, re: WWII.

And, I don't recall the source of the following, but you might agree with much of it:

"Who can now imagine a day when America offered no Social Security, no unemployment compensation, no food stamps, no Federal guarantee of bank deposits, no Federal supervision of the stock market, no Federal protection for collective bargaining, no Federal standards for wages and hours, no Federal support for farm prices or rural electrification, no Federal refinancing for farm and home mortgages, no Federal commitment to high employment or to equal opportunity - in short, no Federal responsibility for Americans who found themselves, through no fault of their own, in economic or social distress?"

Not too many of our Presidents have been all good or all bad...(until now...?)

how does the above jive with our social contract without radical change PC?

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,[1] promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

How about fleshing out the question a bit.

 

[Truthmatters]

Dust Bowl - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

What years did the dust bowl take place?

You see you want to isolate the facts as if they can be looked at in a void.

The total history is the ONLY way it can be examined or you come up with BAD acessments of what happened.

Your UCLA hack proffs failed.

 

[PoliticalChic]

"...irrefutable ..."

Very nice word, and certainly an upgrade for you!

Sadly, you don't know what the word means, as the OP does exactly the reverse of the term.

No where in the OP did I see them claim that FDR didn't get us out of the depression. Just that a singular policy extended it by seven years.

Unless you are ready to deny that the depression lasted longer here, under the FDR policies, than under nations that chose a less ideological fix...

I've already pointed out that it's disingenuous to compare a depression at another place and time with our depression. It's akin to comparing different wars. There might be some similarities, but they are different matters. As I noted, the Dust Bowl greatly compounded the depression. In my part of the world, people were leaving the cities to come and squat on our land because they were starving in the cities.

So, as I said, it makes an interesting academic debate. It's not terribly relevant to what happened. In other words, don't expect the history books to be re-written.

But, kudos, for the choice of a new avatar. Far more adult...

now if you could only do something about the name...

Let's stay on topic. Especially since I could care less of your opinion about my avatar or name.

And now, the winner in the category of unintentional humor:
"Just that a singular policy extended it by seven years. "

Isn't that akin to '...other than that, Ms. Lincoln, how did you like the play?"

Seriously, you're not too dense to get that, ....are you?