The Greatest Generation...

Let's ponder this a bit...

The generation that fought through the Great Depression and WWII is almost unanimously known as the "Greatest Generation". Why?

Is it because they went fifteen years "without"? Did they sacrifice more than the generation that won (or lost) the Civil War 80 years earlier? Were they more capable or more willing than the generation that opted to throw off the blanket of "British" citizenship and all it brought with it and to take up the title of "American"? Does the generation today have any chance to gain the same results as their grandparents?

Even with the "New Deal" on the books by 1939, America was willing to accept rationing, the need for Victory Gardens, the reasoning behind aluminum/rubber/steel/grease drives. This gives lie to the statement that New Deal politics bred a dependence on the Government that wasn't there previously. It wasn't the policies of the New Deal that bred that dependence, but I do think it was (to a certain degree) the result of the "Party" of the New Deal... especially Johnson and his "Great Society" era. Ike and Nixon had their hands in it, too... fear not, but the bulk of the blame goes to the "mentality" that there is NO problem too big that Government can't fix.

Detractors of the New Deal routinely cite the well-documented fact that, even when the actual "depression" ended by 1932, unemployement remained at more than 21% until AFTER the recession of 1937 ended. This, they claim, shows that the New Deal and it's work programs did NOTHING to improve a stagnant domestic employement situation. I disagree.

By 1934, the WPA and the CCC were employing 3.3 million men and women (ranging in age from 14 to 54) at an average annual salary of $1200. Without these 3.3 million jobs and the $3.96 BILLION dollars they were earning every year, where would these men and women find employment? Conservative pundits (claiming "Austrian School" ideals) say that the free market would have found work through the cyclic nature of the economy... meaning, I guess, that once the bottom was found, the job market would have gone UP like everything else did.

HOWEVER, the most glaring fact of the matter is that AT LEAST 21% of the viable work-force in this country REMAINED unemployed after 1934 and until 1939... so if GM, or IBM, or the State of New York, or any other big employer NEEDED to hire new help, 21% of the nation's work-force was available to hire. The only problem was... no one ever hired them. So how would putting an additional 3.3 million able-bodied workers BACK onto the streets have improved our national economy between 1934 and 1939?

The failings of the New Deal from 1930 to 1939 are not FDR's failings, but instead the failings of a GOP Congress that insisted on a balanced budget each and every year... a fiscal impossibility. Higher taxes in a time of massive economic down-turn is a deathtoll to an economy, and the higher taxes were the left-overs of the Hoover years that the GOP refused to relinquish.

Bah... have to go. More later...