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Government keynsian "stimulus" programs prolong abd deepen, not alleviate, an econonic crisis. When an economy is healthy it can tolerate big government spending. When it is in crisis, it cannot. What the government should be doing is nothing. In fact, they could do even better than nothing: cut spending, cut taxes, reduce regulations, and reduce the overall burden of the government on the economy. This approach will be very painful in the short run no doubt, but we'd have a much healthier economy in the long run.
It's like forcing a morbidly obese guy to wake up early every morning to do wind-sprints before work and banning all junk food that he loves from his consumption. Yes, he would find it painful in the short term, but in the long term he's much healthier.
MMT, and stimulus during an economic crisis is like letting that morbidly obese man gorge on cake, ice cream, and pizza, and allowing his sedentary lifestyle to continue, so he can avoid the pain of getting fit and healthy. All economic crises are essentially debt crises. It's impossible to solve a debt crisis by issuing more debt. Which is why we never truly recovred from the last crisis, and why we won't recover from this one either.
Can we learn from the Great Depression and the New Deal and apply insight gained from that to apply to now?
Our Fed is now more knowledgeable, more efficient and stronger than 100 years ago. Particularly through the use of modern fiat, which didn't yet exist for the GD. Modern money people also talk about a national jobs guarantee program. Something I think is just too complicated. But looking at today where jobs were ravaged by the virus, things might be a whole lot different if 40M more people had jobs.
Government keynsian "stimulus" programs prolong abd deepen, not alleviate, an econonic crisis. When an economy is healthy it can tolerate big government spending. When it is in crisis, it cannot. What the government should be doing is nothing. In fact, they could do even better than nothing: cut spending, cut taxes, reduce regulations, and reduce the overall burden of the government on the economy. This approach will be very painful in the short run no doubt, but we'd have a much healthier economy in the long run.
It's like forcing a morbidly obese guy to wake up early every morning to do wind-sprints before work and banning all junk food that he loves from his consumption. Yes, he would find it painful in the short term, but in the long term he's much healthier.
MMT, and stimulus during an economic crisis is like letting that morbidly obese man gorge on cake, ice cream, and pizza, and allowing his sedentary lifestyle to continue, so he can avoid the pain of getting fit and healthy. All economic crises are essentially debt crises. It's impossible to solve a debt crisis by issuing more debt. Which is why we never truly recovred from the last crisis, and why we won't recover from this one either.
Where do you see the US economy in 6 months, 2 years, and beyond?
Can we learn from the Great Depression and the New Deal and apply insight gained from that to apply to now?
The lesson of the Great Depression -- why it was so deep and lasted so long -- is that the government and the central bank have to quickly step in to maintain liquidity (commercial credit lines) and inject fiscal stimulus into the economy. They didn't have those tools and didn't know to use them at that time. When the banks failed, businesses couldn't keep operating, workers got laid off, and money stopped circulating.
Ben Bernanke was a student of all this and as a result saved us from a Depression in 2008 following the Bear Stearns and AIG collapse. Congress was stingy and seriously underfunded Obama's stimulus bill, so the Fed had to carry most of the weight to keep the economy going with TARP and QE.
With the COVID economic shutdown there was bipartisan agreement to do a rapid "helicopter money" cash stimulus to all Americans. Originating in the House, it was a little bit surprising but good to see Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell and Steven Mnuchin all quickly throw their support behind it.
Taken together it seems the government and the Fed have adopted large stimulus and liquidity injections as a standard operating procedure whenever there's a severe economic shock.
Government keynsian "stimulus" programs prolong abd deepen, not alleviate, an econonic crisis. When an economy is healthy it can tolerate big government spending. When it is in crisis, it cannot. What the government should be doing is nothing. In fact, they could do even better than nothing: cut spending, cut taxes, reduce regulations, and reduce the overall burden of the government on the economy. This approach will be very painful in the short run no doubt, but we'd have a much healthier economy in the long run.
It's like forcing a morbidly obese guy to wake up early every morning to do wind-sprints before work and banning all junk food that he loves from his consumption. Yes, he would find it painful in the short term, but in the long term he's much healthier.
MMT, and stimulus during an economic crisis is like letting that morbidly obese man gorge on cake, ice cream, and pizza, and allowing his sedentary lifestyle to continue, so he can avoid the pain of getting fit and healthy. All economic crises are essentially debt crises. It's impossible to solve a debt crisis by issuing more debt. Which is why we never truly recovred from the last crisis, and why we won't recover from this one either.
Actually what many people call a deplorable record.
How many blacks did Lincoln throw in jail for being black? Sorry but saying today's standards for racism are different than they were back then isn't an excuse for what FDR did. And lincoln was president 70 years before FDR first took office- despite that FDR was far more racist. If you want to use the standards of the day, Lincoln is way more enlightened than FDR who wasn't enlightened at all.
1) Emegency banking act/fdic is you combining 2 things into 1
The FDIC also charges banks the same amount per dollar insured regardless of risk is is absolutely absurd.
It also can't begin to actually insure all money at banks if we ever have a real bank run.
But it's is a good physiological tool and overall this was good.
3) social security is a glorified forced ponzi scheme. calling this good is hilarious. what started out as a 1 percent contribution is now over 6 from both the employer and employee.Anyone with half of brain would be way better off never paying a cent into social security and investing for themselves. FDR wasn't stupid and he knew this was a completely unsustainable scam.
4)parts of this are good and parts of it are really bad
5) a mostly hallow act with almost zero actual authority. It doesn't remotely compared to the 1964 civil rights act let alone freeing the slaves so I'm not sure why you even tried to make that comparison. whatever little good it did is more that cancelled out by the horrible treatment of Japanese citizens. Additionally The Federal Housing Administration as part of the new deal prevented blacks from getting mortgages that whites could get and led to even further segregation that would take decades to undo.
He absolutely was NOT a good president for civil rights. In fact he was horrible overall. And yet you compared him to the President who freed the slaves.
6)His inaction helped the rise of Nazism to begin with. He also could have saved a lot more Jews if he acted earlier.Those Nazis put Jews in concentration camps. FDR putting Japanese citizens in them is only better than Hitler because he wasn't also killing them.He was also a huge fan of Mussolini.
You conveniently left out how much money he stole from American citizens during a Depression.
And the fact his actions dragged it out way longer than it should have lasted.
And if it wasn't for the war it would have dragged out even further.
Some other horrible things he did
1) trying to pack the Supreme Court a gross overreach of presidential power. He wanted to be a dictator not a president.
2)had farmers burn food despite the country being filled with starving people on the idiotic notion that if the supply of food decreased prices for food would increase. the problem was people weren't buying food because they couldn't afford it.
3) was against an anti-lynching bill because it would cost him votes. sounds like he really cared about black people.
4) was completely against a free press
4)overall financially the new deal was a disaster and the economy was terrible for the duration of his 3 plus terms in large part due to his terrible financial policies. I mean it's really incredible that someone who was president as long as he was, who always had a TERRIBLE economy could be considered a good president.
He even issued an executive order that would tax people at 100 percent of their income over 25k a year because none of his moronic financial policies helped anyone, which Congress repealed.
Like I said he did a few good things. Anyone good is going to do a few bad things and almost anyone bad is going to do a few good things. He had over 12 years as president and threw enough **** at the wall that a little bit of it stuck. Overall he was a deplorable president as I stated earlier, especially economically.
When analyzing history like this you can't use your own standards or modern standards. You can only use the standards of the time. There was not the choice between bad and perfect.
Banks - they were near complete collapse, which had already happened in Austria 1931, then Germany 1932. That brought about Hitler. He had to do something.
Social Security - is not a ponzi scheme unless you consider human demographics a ponzi scheme. It did more to alleviate elderly poverty than anything else. The elderly were getting evicted at high rates and were a large proportion of the Hooverville populations. He had to do something.
Isolationism - FDR did what he could politically, but there was no political party in America at the time willing to mobilize troops against Germany. The memory of WWI to the 1930s was like the memory of Vietnam and Iraq to Americans today. There were no foreign policy hawks that could possibly have gotten elected in the 1930s. Herbert Hoover was even more tolerant of the Nazis; had he been re-elected he might have helped them more.
Jews - Anti-semitism was rife in America in 1930s. Trying to take in eastern european jewish refugees caused riots. No other party was any better.
FDR did more for blacks than any Democrat before him & more than the Republicans were willing to do. They had stopped sticking their necks out for blacks since the rise of the KKK in the 20s. FDR was somewhat constrained by the strong southern element of the Democrats at that time. No president could have fixed that at the time.
On the economy it's not clear that any of the potential Republican presidents of the 1930s would have been any better. Alf Landon and Wendell Willkie did not run on ending the New Deal, they ran on making it better & more efficient, saying they could run it with lower taxes, lower regulations, and create more jobs.
if you don't want to use standards of today that's one thing. he didn't make some disparaging comments about Japanese people- he locked them in jail and stole their businesses.Sorry that's not something you can just dismiss so easily.
He robbed the American people of their gold- no time period ever makes this acceptable.
You talked about civil rights for blacks when he did way more harm than good so you bringing up civil right for blacks was absurd. His policies led to more segregation not less.
I already agreed with you that his banking policies were mostly good. I don't know why you're mentioning them again and arguing with me on something we agree on.
Of course social security is a forced ponzi scheme. What about it isn't a ponzi scheme?Without new money coming in (which is forced) it completely collapses on its own. It's bleeding money despite the fact we now pay way more into it percentage wise than people did when it started.
And the bigger topper- the economy was AWFUL for the duration of his presidency.And he was a 3+ term president not some one term guy with bad luck. Sorry but you can't be a president for over 12 years, always have a terrible economy and reasonably be considered a good president. People were living in those Hoovervilles you mentioned for so long because of the awful economy.By the "standards of the day" a ton of people were starving and homeless.Despite people starving he had farmers not only destroy food in an effort to drive up food prices- but that didn't even work. By the "standards of the day" that's deplorable.
The eldery were not a large percentage of hoovervilles in any disproportionate way.In fact they were overwhelmingly male immigrants.
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