All throughout my History 1 & 2 and all my American history courses throughout college I kept hearing the same thing about Franklin Roosevelt, and I have to admit I believed what the teachers were saying. It amazes me how much I started to believe while sitting in a college classroom about politics. I never reversed on my morals, but when you have a history teacher that you think is so smart teaching you the liberal agenda day in and day out you start to give in. The thing that most teachers will tell you about FDR is how his policies got the U.S. out of the depression. It took me to actually sit down and study about his policies and the data that followed to realize that it just wasn't the truth. There are so many policies that FDR instituted that we could go on forever listing them and the effects they caused. I will give a few examples:
1933 Agricultural adjustment act- restricted production to keep prices high. 'Excess' output was destroyed or dumped abroad. While millions of Americans were going hungry, the government plowed under 10 million acres of crops, slaughtered 6 million pigs, and left fruit to rot. Production of milk, fruits, and other products was cartelized to boost prices under 'marketing orders' begun in 1937." which means they made it illegal to increase production. The reason for this was to keep production low so prices high but what they did not anticipate was the number of workers who would not have jobs because production was cut. So how would anybody buy the products.
By the time FDR ran for re-election unemployment rate skyrocketed to 20%
New Deal policies made it harder for employers to hire people. FDR tripled federal taxes between 1933 and 1940. Social Security excise taxes on payrolls discouraged employers from hiring. New Deal securities laws made it harder for employers to raise capital. New Deal antitrust lawsuits harassed some 150 employers and whole industries. Whatever the merits of such policies might have been, it was bizarre to disrupt private sector employment when the median unemployment rate was 17 percent.
Class Warfare was implemented during this administration: It's the rich peoples fault and they should have to give more money to the poor people who don't have any. Sound familiar?
Roosevelt set up the biggest power grab in history with his new deal. He set up the biggest welfare state in history. And if not for world War II the economy would have continued to suffer.
Now our president Barack Obama is making FDR's new deal seem like a pittance. He has increased government control, he has increased the welfare state, he continues to want to punish the rich(who makes jobs). All for control of the people and in the name of saving the economy.
Henry Morgenthau, who served as Roosevelt's treasury secretary, admitted to a congressional committee in May 1939 (as quoted in the recent book New Deal or Raw Deal? by Burton Folsom, Jr.): "We are spending more money than we have ever spent before and it does not work.... 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."
Mr. Obama if you want to look at history and see if what you are doing works it does not. Just see what Roosevelt's secretary of treasury had to say.
If we can not stop the policies being implemented NOW it will be hard to do so in the future. It's time to get out and vote these idiots out of office. Republicans and Democrats alike.
