I had some fun at Andrew Sullivan’s expense a couple of weeks ago, mocking him for asserting that spending cuts today would be repeating the mistakes of Herbert Hoover. That was a rather odd thing for him to write since Hoover boosted the burden of government spending by 47 percent in just four years.
Since it is notoriously difficult to educate Obamaphiles, I’m guessing that he (and others) need some supplementary material.
How about the words of a key aide to Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Would that be considered a legitimate source? One would think so, which means this excerpt from a 2007 book review (the same statement was also cited by PBS) is rather revealing.
FDR aide Rexford Tugwell would claim in a 1974 interview that “practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started.”
The fact that Hoover and Roosevelt were two peas in a big-government pod may be of interest to economic historians, but the real lesson is that intervention didn’t work for either one of them. That’s what Andrew Sullivan and others need to learn. But since people like that probably won’t listen to me, maybe they’ll be more willing to accept the confession of Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary.
FDR’s Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, wrote in his diary: “We have tried spending money. We are spending more 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!”
