The New Deal and FDR allowed capitalism, and, more importantly, the people who lived under it, to survive the depression with democracy intact. Many nations and people weren’t so fortunate. It is important to remember that there are worse methods than Social Security, the WPA and even Supreme Court packing to counter the misery depressions bring. Fascism, Anti-Semitism and militarism, to name three.
No set of statistics can convince me that the New Deal was a failure. The number that speaks loudest across the years is four. That’s the number of times the people who were there, and knew best, elected the man who gave them the New Deal.
Now, once again, an administration has to reinvent capitalism before capitalism invents itself out of existence. We’ve done it before. I think we’re in the right hands to do it again.
But I’ll be more comfortable if those hands aren’t as empty as Rush Limbaugh’s fridge. Spend away, President Obama, but keep the burn rate down. We’re going to be here a while.
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