Honest questions... honest answers...

And I am not intentionally ignoring your asides... they are simply hard to keep up with.

So, my response to Honest Question #1:  "My simple question, with 13 million Americans out of work today (&its closer to 19 million when using the government's own "U6" number), is why do you not advocate a similar approach now? There are millions of hungry mouths to feed now. Millions of out of work young men & needed infrastructure repairs now. There are holes in the banking, SSI, and energy industries now (presumably in need of government intervention/oversight). So where is your advocation of New Deal 2.0? "

Because the government protections that I feel are warranted to those facing hardship... be it unemployment or abject poverty due to circumstances outside their control... are already in place, thanks in large part to FDR's New Deal programs like Social Security, unemployment insurance, and any other Federal, State or local government assistance program that exist today, but did not exist prior to 1932.  Today, we have between 13 and 19 million people sitting on very hard times, I know... but those people have resources that the 12 million in 1932 simply did not have, and no significant percentage of today's unemployed have faced anything near what people in 1932 have faced, poo-poo me all you want.  No one saw thousands of homeless and foreclosed farmers walking... walking!... from Kansas and Oklahoma to the west coast in hopes of finding work picking watermelons in the San Joaquin valley in the last four years, did they?  I didn't.

Another example:  In 2010, the US Census Bureau said that 9% of people over the age of 65 were living in abject poverty (meaning they couldn't meet their own daily needs fiscally, nutritionally, or health-wise).  In 1935, that number was 59%... and I shouldn't have to point out that a significantly higher number of people today are over the age of 65 then were a percentage of the population in 1935.  So, smack dab in the middle of the Obama Recession we see only 9% poverty levels for 65+ age groups... and you are asking me if I think we need a new New Deal?  Do you see the difference here?  The difference is 59% versus 9%, and you are seriously comparing the two?

My point, from the beginning, has been that New Deal was a response to a crisis.  So, my honest answer to your question is that "watered down" versions of crisis responses do not equal solutions when there is no comparable crisis to respond to.  The problems in our national economic engines that allowed the Crash of '29 to happen at all have been fixed... and the crisis of the Great Depression has never repeated, so no repeat of the solutions taken need be applied.

Honest Question #2:  "Is that such an unreasonable position for a mindful conservative to take?"

Your second question, to be quite frank, eluded me... so I simply used this one as my primer.

On SSI.  You can't possibly think to rip me up about trying to say that Social Security today is different than Social Security Insurance in 1935, can you?  Because that is exactly what you did only a few posts ago.  The Social Security Act of 1935 clearly states that the moneys to be distributed to the individual States by the Social Security Administration Executive are to be taken from the funds collected the previous quarter, based on the enrolled needs of each State's participating population on a quarterly basis (Title I, Sec 3).  There was no structured "savings account" that the Government was intending to keep money in that was withheld from a 21 year old's paycheck and then distributed to that same person 35 years later.  That may have been FDR's vision, as you say... but it isn't in the Act that he signed into law on August 14th, 1935, so I can't really speak to that.

What I can say is that Social Security, as defined by the Act he signed into law, was a form of regulated and mandatory insurance collected and distributed by the Federal Government through the Social Security Administration, as a means of guarantying a minimum subsistence level of income for anyone qualifying for the benefit.  The requirements for that qualification have changed and expanded since 1935... there is no question about that, but that can't be blamed on FDR, can it?  How can he be held responsible for Eisenhower's expansion of the program in 1953 by ten million people?  Or Kennedy's?  Or Nixon's?  Or Ronald W. Reagan's in 1982 (presumably in response to the recession he can't be blamed for, either)?

On my continually bringing up FDIC and SEC:

If I can't point to FDIC and SEC as successes because they are the "only ones"... and I can't come to agree with your view of the failure of SSI... what is left of New Deal to debate in 2012?  What other programs are there to point at and say "This isn't working, it is a drain on the economy, it is a waste of moneys and effort!"?  The WPA?  It ended in June of '43... never to rise again after employing nearly 9 million people with no employment prospects outside of WPA in such wasteful and unprofitable ventures as the TVA, Golden Gate, Hoover Dam, National Flood Control projects on the Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee, Missouri, Colorado rivers, and 75% of all municipal air raid systems after Dec 7, 1941.  The CCC?  Ended in 1942 when it was determined that the needs of the country no longer required the program.  Tennessee Valley Association?  Still around, making the Fed between $189 and $240 million each year in effortless revenue.  Hoover Dam?  Still there, powering your computer as we type.  What about Los Alamos laboratories?  Another New Deal waste, right?  The Empire State Building?  That hasn't paid for itself a hundred times over.

Sorry... getting tired and this is such a hard point to have to argue over and over again.

Could some things have been done BETTER during the Great Depression than what was done in New Deal?  Certainly, I won't argue that.  Did EVERYTHING that FDR tried work?  Certainly not.  I can admit this, candidly and honestly... but I am doing it from the vantage point of fifty-some years after the fact.  When this was happening at the moment, none of this had ever been tried, and the status quo had failed for the better part of four years.  Not simply failed to bring a recovery, but the symptoms of the disease that was the depression got worse and worse with each passing year from '29 to '33... why?  If New Deal failed as utterly as you say, then why did the recovery... ANY recovery at all... start ONLY after FDR was in office and not before?

That's my honest question.