Let me clear the air

Liberals have been indoctrinted to believe that FDR's spending helped America during the depression.  

Let's not make the same mistake, tell team Obama to not follow Hoover's and FDR's failed strategy because the facts surrounding FDR and the Great Depression tell us something else. "Fully 17.2 percent of Americans, or 9,480,000, remained unemployed in 1939, up from 16.3 percent, or 8,020,000 in 1931". [1]

So rather than just showing FDR's failures based on statistics, let me use FDR's Secretary of The Treasury own words. 

"Here was Morgenthau, the secretary of the treasury, an expert on finance, a fount of statistics on the American economy during the 1930s; his best friend was the president of the United States and the author of the New Deal; key public policy decisions had to go through Morgenthau to get a hearing. And yet, with all this power, Morgenthau felt helpless.  After almost two full terms of Roosevelt and the New Deal, here are Morgenthau's startling words -- his confession -- spoken candidly before his fellow Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee":

We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong...somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises....I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started....And an enormous debt to boot![2]

 Works Cited

New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America . New York: Threshold Editions: Simon and Schuster, 2008.

Comments

[Nonplussed]

The Platypus reads one article that supports his silly ideology and now claims he understands all about the causes of the Great Depression. This is more than most economists, with 9 years of education and many more years of economic research, will claim.

Congrats to the Platypus. Who knew we had such an intellectual in our midst?

[Platy]

Silly, this is s direct quote from the FDR administration. It has nothing to do with me.

The New Deal was a failure according to FDR's administration. End of story.

Platy

[Nonplussed]

Umm, Platypus, I am pretty skeptical that this quote was ever made. The supposed source is Morgenthau's testimony to to the House Ways and Means committee in May 1939. Morgenthau says "..after 8 years..." yet FDR had been in office only 6 years. That's a little odd.

Also odd is the fact that you cannot find the whole quote without the ellipses anywhere. Anywhere. Normally, this is the case.

Even more odd is the fact that this story was not news at the time. You would think that the Sect'y of the Treasury breaking with his president and saying the admin's actions were a failure might garner a little news story, wouldn't you? I looked at the NY Times and Washington Post's archives and found no mention of his statement.

And finally, the statement he supposedly made about the unemployment rate is demonstrbaly false.

Let me suggest an alternative. This quote never happened. This is another one of those fables your kind likes to pass around to each each other.

[Platy]

"Umm, Platypus, I am pretty skeptical that this quote was ever made."

You're silly. Just go to the Jayson Blair section of the New York Times and you can find all you need to know!

If you bothered to research, you would see that Henry Morgenthau and FDR differed quite often regarding the direction of the New Deal.

Platy

[Nonplussed]

Oh, I get it... the NYT refused to publish Morgenthau's critique of his President because they were state controlled. As did the Washington Post. Fine- can you find a single instance of a newspaper reporting in May 1939 that Morgenthau had turned on FDR's economic policies? Many of the newspapers in the late 1930s were anti-FDR. Surely one of them would have run with this story? If it were real.

In any case, it is demonstrably false that FDR'sadministration had been trying stimulus for 8 years, and demonstrably false that unemployment hadn't fallen. This really isnlt that complicated to understand.

[Platy]

Come on, please deploy some intellect please! It is fine for you to challenge me however, use data to refute, not BS.

I have sourced my thesis and you on the other hand, have provide liberal BS.

Sorry, but you need to do better.

Platy

[Platy]

More on this subject.

Most historians will agree Morgenthau did not see massive government spending as the answer to the problems caused by the Great Depression.

"Treasury Secretary Morgenthau maintained that recovery could only come through reviving business confidence, and that the only way to achieve this was by balancing the budget".[1]

1 Was There a Keynesian Economy in the USA between 1933 and 1945?
Author(s): Patrick Renshaw
Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Jul., 1999), pp. 337-364
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.

[Nonplussed]

So you weren't able to find any evidence that an improbable quote of Henry Morgenthau supposedly uncovered by a obscure right wing professor at an extreme right wing college actually was ever made? I am shocked! Shocked!

Here's a tip, my friend. When something is too good to be true, it usually isn't. That certainly applies to phony quotes.