"We never made good on our promises."

There is so much here to deal with (forgive the pun), so much failure that we could do entire books worth of posts. But I'll stop everything and touch on what I see as the obvious ...

How could you be this wrong about Hoover? He almost single handily made the Depression twice as bad by abandoning his own principles (more on this below). He was anything but "hands off." Towards the end of his term he was raising taxes and tariffs, and after the crash he signed Smoot-Hawley into law, which implemented stifling embargoes on foreign imports in a misguided attempt to protect domestic businesses. In fact it was retaliatory to Europeans, and their purchases of US farming goods (a third of the American work force) all but dried up. It was a disaster from the very first day, & FDR continued it. I akin this hands on mistake to FDR's oppressive tax rates. Between the two can you imagine trying to start a new business? The word daunting doesn't cover it. Secondly, Hoover set the public works (as relief) standard, it is the Hoover Dam after all. You act as if everyone before FDR was just sitting around until he got there. It's clear that FDR came in and CONTINUED and EXPANDED Hoover's post crash policies. And this is particularly sad given they had a recent precedent, the Depression at the end of Wilson's administration, to follow. Harding came in & cut taxes, the top marginal rate went from 73% to 24%, and he actually shrank the size of government (not in the rate of growth, the size). The result? The Roaring 20's, in which the household accumulation of luxury items like telephones, refrigerators, & electricity skyrocketed.

The minimum wage (a New Deal policy) arguably cost millions of jobs, by itself. There were immediate lay offs after its' implementation, and these were people who thought themselves "lucky" to have survived 1929 with a job. I was wrong about the 100% tax rate FDR requested from congress. I said it was on all wages earned as income over 250k. In fact, it was for all wages earned over 25k. Congress baulked and reduced it to 90%. Hoover introduced, in the first year of the Depression, an "emergency" Excise Tax. Whereas a tariff is a tax on imports, an excise tax is a tariff on commodities manufactured within the nation. It's usually applied to vices. For example prior to 1929 80% of all excise taxes were collected from tobacco. Hoover and the Democrats in congress instituted it on cars, movie tickets, radios, phonographs, telegrams, long distance phone calls, cameras, bank checks, stock transfers, cosmetics, yachts, jewelery, furs, and a new one cent per gallon tax on gasoline. It should be noted, economists regard excise taxes as regressive - hitting lower income earners the hardest. This is essentially a usage tax, or the VAT tax (value added tax) advocated today (and used in the UK). FDR kept the "emergency" excise tax (which grew to include other commodities) and renewed it almost every year he was in office. Lets add the new 1% tax on employers for Social Security (by the way, saying that FDR wasn't the one who screwed it up later is like saying the Titanic had a great maiden voyage up until the time of the ice berg - it was his program, his course that he set with the inherint "Ponzi" aspects built in). The Revenue Act of 1935 was a more progressive tax on corporate earnings, and in his war on "big business", FDR - in both rhetoric and policy - dwarfs Obama. You should read some of Roosevelt's SOTU addresses, they sound familiar. In the 1936 address he called business leaders an old "resplendent economic autocracy." That they were fighting his "new instruments of public power." He added, "In the hands of a people's government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people." There's you "free from want", or need. This was in response to the growing opposition of heavy corporate taxation. In 1935 the NMA (National Manufacturing Association) allied against FDR with the stated goal of "ending New Deal." The DuPonts and other businesses of note formed a "Liberty League" to oppose him. Let me ask you - do they know more or less about creating jobs and expanding business than the man whom proposed a "2nd Bill of Rights?" Just curious. FDR was the first, and most rabid, class warrior. FDR advanced his war on business - and this is a BIG one. He levied a tax on all undistributed corporate profits. It was meant to force corporations into paying out those profits as income so his progressive tax system could get to them. The problem is those coffers held the monies which all businesses use to expand, do R&D, buy new machinery, and save for the future. In another address Roosevelt stated about that new tax that it would be, "Made harder for big corporations to retain the huge undistributed profits with which they gobble up small business." The problem is all small businesses want to become big. And this tax prevented (or at least hindered) their expansion. A Forbes poll from the same year reported that 90% of business executives (both big and small) wanted a repeal of the tax. I ask again - did they or FDR know more about creating a healthy economy and expanding jobs? How many times does the word "tax" appear this post alone? Titus, you can not simply say, "well he got the taxes end of Keynesian economics wrong, but it was an overall success." WRONG - you can't get THAT part of Keynsian economics wrong and achieve success under the Keynesian model, it does not work that way. How many administrations, who lowered taxes, must there be to prove this? These taxes devastated economic growth, you musn't skip past them as an acknowledged failure and move on to the Golden Gate bridge. It's bigger than that simple acknowledgement. It was the poison that infected the entire body. You can't say, yeah he's got cancer, but we healed that broken leg, so the overall hospital visit was a success. By the way, if FDR's continual reelection is a source of "proof" that he was popular with "somebody", as you put it, do the midterms in which Republicans won overwhelming margins not reveal his unpopularity? Those same "someones" were voting for them as well. I'm just asking, like the 2010 elections of our era.

Moving on, it's also arguable (irrefutable in my book) that the AAA hurt farming. It guaranteed a floor price of certain crops (notably wheat and cotton). So what did farmers do? Switch to those crops, causing food shortages in other areas. This is the result of government intrusion into the market place - the law of unintended consequences.

The NRA for the first time gave the government the power to "approve" with legal force how much a factory could expand, what wages were to be paid, the number of hours to be worked, and the prices of all the products within the given industry. These are the things Adam Smith wrote explicitly against. FDR himself noted (about a program you said failed): "History will probably record the National Industrial Recovery Act (later shortened to NRA) as the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by the American Congress." The 540 codes that ensued tended to raise prices, raise wages, reduce working hours and and remove competition. Now Titus, the NRA (if I remember correctly) is something you put in the "falied" category. FDR considered it his centerpiece - how could New Deal be an overall successful when the centerpiece failed? And I say "failed" before having even gotten to the Constituionality of these programs.

Now I can go on and on and on - the Air Mail Act that fell short, the FERA Camps, Court Packing... The clear picture is that the man tried to single handily manage the economy. YOU KNOW THAT DOESN'T WORK. And I haven't even scratched the surface of all the other ripe meat within New Deal. The sum total effect on the working (or not working) man's most important number - unemployment - was clear. In 1931 unemployment was 16.3% or 8,020,000 million Americans. In 1939 it averaged for the year 17.2%, or 9,480,000 Americans. After all the spending, all the free market manipulation (and I didn't even get to the commerce clause perversions), after all the attempts and programs, all the new taxes collected, and expansion of Washington oversight with a litany of new departments, there we sat, at a higher unemployment rate 8 years later. You can play this debate game of "it must have worked because there's been no depression in the 80 years since", but that is not our standard of "worked." The standard we set down at the onset of this debate, years ago, was whether New Deal policies (& their ilk from Hoover) caused a national economic recovery, pulling us out of the era known as the Great Depression, or did WWII? In other words, would the era have continued without the advent of war? I think the evidence on that score is clear ... and I bet in 1939 about 9,480,000 people would agree with me. Well, 9,480,000 ... and one (see below).

I'll close with this:

"We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises ... I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when it started ... And an enormous debt to boot."

-Henry Morgenthau

He was a longtime confidant of FDR, one the few men that could look FDR in the face, according to Eleanor Roosevelt, and tell him he was wrong. And for 10 years he served not just as FDR's close friend, but his Secretary of the Treasury. Titus, he was an architect of New Deal. Those words were spoken by Morgenthau, the sitting Secretary of the Treasury, to his fellow Democrats in May of 1939 in his testimony at a Congressional hearing held by the House Ways and Means Committee.

Do you know better than he? Surely even you don't have an ego that big.