Left In Lowell

Oh thank goodness. Devilstower put some perspective on the whole century-long “debate” about what really got us out of the Great Depression. Republicans would like to have you think that’s in dispute, at best, and believe they have the answer (war war war) at worst.

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.

Devilstower has a great chart showcasing economic growth, then the following:

Where was the stimulus? Just take a look. From the moment FDR began to enact the programs of the New Deal, the economy began its recovery. After four years of steady declines, Roosevelt’s programs brought on an immediate improvement in the national fortune. Within three years, the national GDP exceeded the level in 1929. By the time the bombs fell at Pearl Harbor, the GDP had been up every year but one since 1933, and that one downward tick in 1937 marks the exact point at which budget hawks forced cuts in the New Deal programs.

That’s the story the numbers tell. The New Deal worked, worked well, and worked quickly. These days, we define recessions as two consecutive quarters of declining gross domestic product. By that measure, when did the Great Depression end? One quarter after Roosevelt took office, that’s when.

The post then mocks the Republican’s “explanation” for the end of the Great Depression, which they claim was WWII and the ramp-up to becoming a society at war:

So Republicans have developed the idea the government putting people to work, spending on public works, and taking a bigger hand in the markets couldn’t possibly help. Instead, things were cured when the government put even more people to work, spent many times more, and took absolute control of prices and wages.

The whole thing’s worth a read though, for the snark alone (the beginning of the post is in the form of a fairy tale…and I know you like a good story).