This is a must read article. The following snippet from the article says it best. Click here for the entire great article.
QUOTE: Did the stimulus provided by the New Deal work? Here’s a real economist (Charles McMillion, the former associate director of the Johns Hopkins University Policy Institute and a former contributing editor of the Harvard Business Review — see, he has a name and everything, unlike the mythological "all kinds" of folks on the right) to tell you about it.
It is imperative to expose a dangerous popular myth regarding the efficacy of President Roosevelt’s actions: that it was not the programs of the New Deal, but only the placing of the nation on a wartime footing years later, that restored the health of the nation’s economy.
This belief, though widely held, cannot stand up to even the most basic economic analysis. Yet the mainstream corporate media, which abound with anti-government ideology, seek to reinforce this myth.
Almost all of the commentary on the right these days draws from a single source, The Forgotten Man, by Amity Shlaes. You can think of Shlaes as the Coulter of conservative economics. Her book is peppered with the horrors experienced by the nation under FDR. (Did you know that somebody in Brooklyn got so depressed that they committed suicide while Roosevelt was president? It’s true!) Shlaes, whose academic background is untarnished by any actual study of economics, is the perfect packager of the Republican myth, and her book carefully avoids all those nasty facts that tend to get in the way of the plot.
In it, Shlaes… completely leaves out any specific data on gross domestic product, incomes, consumer spending, production, investment or jobs even for the New Deal period she presumes to explain. Indeed, her pitch is based entirely on emotional misrepresentation.
Income, production, jobs… what do those things have to do with the Great Depression? Not much, if you’re Republican. If anyone on the right had bothered to check any of these numbers, what would they find? Something like this.
Daily Kos: Once Upon a Time in Republican Land…
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