You’ve been hearing this piece of idiocy forever, “It wasn’t the New Deal that saved us from the Great Depression, it was World War II.” In other words, domestic deficit spending is evil, but military deficit spending on a humungous scale is somehow not deficit spending at all! Go Figure.
New Deal Bashing, DeBunked!
All WWII proved, economically, was that Roosevelt should have spent 100 times more than he did to get us out of the Great Depression. He had to fight the conservatives for every nickel. Keynes had the answer: Spend your way out of recession/depression, and pay off your debts in times of plenty. But what if, during the good years, your leaders want to keep the government flood gates open to feather their nests? History proves that War Spending is the opiate of the corrupt government. For some reason, it’s so much easier to get $50 million for a new fighter jet, but impossible to find a few bucks for crumbling bridges or water treatment. What does that tell you about your national priorities? You tell me. The New Democratic Congress should review each and every New Deal roll back since the first Reagan Administration, and reinstate them all.
This IS All Reagan’s Fault
In the early 1980’s the Reagan Administration was faced with a dilemma. The Nation’s infra structure was crumbling and our industrial base was rusting over, antiquated, and desperate for an upgrade. Leaders of Industry grumbled that in WWII we destroyed all the factories in Germany and Japan, then built them new ones that they were now, a generation later, using to defeat us economically. Yet when Jesse Jackson called for a Domestic Marshall Plan to rebuild our industry he was called a cook, socialist, radical, or worse, a union man. When Jerry Brown suggested we could build a national industry around environmental clean-up and alternative power, he was trivialized and given the name, Governor Moonbeam. SO Reagan was presented with two ways to go: the Progressive way, investing in our future, or another way, suggested by Wall Street, cannibalize your industries and let us make billions selling off the usable parts. Guess which way the old geezer went? In order to destroy the nation’s economic base, however, Reagan needed to get rid of the safeguards put in place by Franklin Roosevelt to prevent another Great Depression. And this he did with great glee. Almost immediately the markets started crashing again. He borrowed a trillion from the Japanese, but instead of investing it in America, he handed it over, lock, stock, and barrel, to the military industrials. Recession was the result. It’s time historians took off the blinders when Reagan’s name is mentioned, and look at the man for what he was, a spokesperson for the Evangelical Millenarian Right, who believed Armaggeden right around the corner and wanted to get as rich as possible, as soon as possible, no matter the consequences.