FDR demanded action; 44, Congress falter

16 June 2011 |permalink | email article

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his 1933 inaugural address, began by saying “this is a day of national consequence . . .  The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. . . . This nation asks for action, and action now. Our greatest primary task is to put people to work.”

FDR didn’t waste time. As the Great Depression deepened, he announced the creation of a Civil Works Administration. CWA took $400 million from the Public Works Fund, $150 million from the Relief Administration, released two million men from local and State relief rolls at once, put two million other unemployed to work by Dec. 15, 1933. CWA workers were employed 30 hours a week on small local projects, and received approximately $50 dollars a month.

Switch reels to June 2011. Professor Larry Summers, a former U.S. Treasury Secretary, and now back at Harvard. Writing at Huffington Post, he said the while 2008-2009 policy effort successfully prevented financial collapse and depression, the U.S. is now halfway to a lost economic decade. Noting the country’s resilience he made a powerful case that more stimulus is urgent. Summers pointed out the fraction of the population working has fallen form 63.1 % to 58.4%, reducing the number of those with jobs by more than 10 million.

“But for Hitler and the military buildup he caused, FDR would have left office in early 1941 a failure, with American unemployment above 15% and with the recovery promise of the New Deal shattered by the premature attempt in 1937 to reassert traditional virtues of deficit reduction and inflation control.”

In terms of FDR’s 1933 version of a stimulus package, and how it was killed in 1937, President Obama and Congress have so far failed to learn the lessons of history. The nation demands action now. 
 
Campaign trail

“There’s a simple reason our party is nowhere near being a national governing party. No one wants to be around a bunch of cranks.” – Veteran Republican strategist John Weaver, backing Jon Huntsman, pitched Esquire that his candidate has the intelligence, foreign policy experience and record on fiscal conservatism to shake up the GOP field he calls the “weakest since 1940.” FDR won that election.

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