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Roosevelt ran for office promising to use the Harding method of ending a recession...
. America’s greatest depression fighter was (Republican) Warren Gamaliel Harding. An Ohio senator when he was elected president in 1920, he followed (Democrat) Woodrow Wilson who got America into World War I, ...Harding inherited the mess, in particular the post-World War I depression – almost as severe, from peak to trough, as the Great Contraction from 1929 to 1933, that FDR inherited and prolonged. Richard K. Vedder and Lowell E. Gallaway, in their book Out of Work (1993), noted that the magnitude of the 1920 depression "exceeded that for the Great Depression of the following decade for several quarters." The estimated gross national product plunged 24% from $91.5 billion in 1920 to $69.6 billion in 1921. The number of unemployed people jumped from 2.1 million in 1920 to 4.9 million in 1921.
Then he did exactly what Hoover did to engineer a recession.....the opposite of what he knew would end the recession!!!!!!!
October 19, 1932, he nailed Hoover, observing that in recent years federal expenses had increased by $1 billion "and that I may add, is the most reckless and extravagant past that I have been able to discover in the statistical record of any peacetime Government anywhere, any time." http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=88399
"...[a] month after accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination for the office of president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered a campaign radio address to the nation. He focused on the extravagant spending policies of Herbert Hoover’s administration and the federal budget deficits it had created: “Let us have the courage to stop borrowing to meet continuing deficits,” Roosevelt said. “Revenues must cover expenditures by one means or another. Any government, like any family, can, for a year, spend a little more than it earns. But you know and I know that a continuation of that habit means the poorhouse.”
Monetary Central Planning and the State Part 13 FDR s New Deal - The Future of Freedom Foundation
. And this: "... carrying out the plain precept of our Party, which is to reduce the cost of current Federal Government operations by 25 percent." Ibid.
FDR's promises!!!
And.....the very same plan that Harding used to tame an earlier upheaval.
And it worked.
...to begin with, in March of 1933, he didn't fill his cabinet with persons committed to a balanced budget. A pretty much poke 'in your eye.'
Nah....instead the bunch put together the huge spending and administrative expansion of his first hundred day, Douglas knew the real deal.
Roosevelt expanded the federal government and ran up deficits much greater than those of Hoover.
