For Insight on Stimulus Battle, Look to the '30s

[babylonsister]

Suck on it, rethugs.

For Insight on Stimulus Battle, Look to the '30s
For Left and Right, Issue Rekindles New Deal Debate


Above, thousands of unemployed people who marched from Pennsylvania to Washington in 1932 mass at the Capitol to ask for aid. Below, job seekers wait in line to meet employers at a job fair in Newark, N.J.

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 12, 2009; Page D01


Underlying the partisan division over President Obama's stimulus bill is a dispute over history -- a decades-old debate between liberals and conservatives over the impact the New Deal had in bringing the country out of the Great Depression.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said flatly last week that "the big-spending programs of the New Deal did not work." Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) said, "If we look back, even to the New Deal, it's not going to help employment." And two economists argued in the Wall Street Journal that "there was even less work on average during the New Deal than before FDR took office."

But most mainstream economists say the lessons of the Depression, which didn't end until World War II spending kicked in, are different. They say New Deal spending programs instituted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt -- combined with moves to bolster the banking system, loosen monetary policy and end the gold standard -- did help put millions of people back to work. At the same time, they say that federal spending increases under Roosevelt before the war were modest compared with the size of the economy, and not a good test of stimulus spending.

"The Depression at its worst moment had 25 percent unemployed," said Alice Rivlin, former Clinton budget director and former director of the Congressional Budget Office. "Many of those people got back to work. Not all of them. We still had very high unemployment for many years. But to say it didn't work is to say we know what would have happened without it."

Like most disputes about the past, the wrestling match over the lessons of the Depression has everything to do with the present. If Roosevelt's New Deal programs -- such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration and Social Security -- didn't revive the economy in the 1930s, Republicans in Congress have a powerful argument justifying their opposition to President Obama's stimulus program. And if the Roosevelt programs worked, Democrats can justify the huge stimulus package as following a successful precedent.

more...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/11/AR2009021104092.html

[doc03]

1. There is a big difference between the New Deal

Spending Programs and this so called stimulus package. In Ohio we have the Muskingum Watershed District where I believe 18 dams were built and they still help prevent floods and provide most of our recreational areas. We still have areas that receive their electricity through the REA. I see little permanent infrastructure improvements in this bill. The state of Ohio is going to get less than $1 billion for infrastructure, they will spend that much on a couple projects in Columbus just like always and we will be lucky to patch a pothole in the rural counties.

[babylonsister]

2. I've read about what you see and don't see. You think it's a waste of money.

Do you ever wonder why you're in the minority? And what shape do you think the MWD is in? Has yearly maintenance been done on it, or have funds not been available? Do we wait til a dam or two starts cracking before we consider it a problem?
I'm a tad more optimistic than you that something good will come out of this bill.

[doc03]

3. The MWCD was set up as a self sustaining

corporation and it seems to be maintained well to me. Haven't seen any broken dams yet in the 70 plus years since its construction..