Limbaugh

[yyz28]

4. Partially true. WWII did ultimately get us out of the depression, but the New Deal and Roosevelt's works programs had us steered toward recovery. Hoover wanted balance the freaking budget! Are you kidding me?

The new deal was an abject failure. From one end to the other. There was NO IMPROVEMENT in our economy in the 8 years leading up to WWII, and it can be easliy argued that the economy remaining on its back is a RESULT of FDR's actions and that without the New Deal the Great Depression would have been a typical depression.

Economist Jim Powell of the Cato Institute authored a splendid book on the Great Depressionin 2003, titled “FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression”. He points out that “Almost all the failed banks were in states with unit banking laws” — laws that prohibited banks from opening branches and thereby diversifying their portfolios and reducing their risks. Powell writes: “Although the United States, with its unit banking laws, had thousands of bank failures, Canada, which permitted branch banking, didn’t have a single failure ...”20 Strangely, critics of capitalism who love to blame the market for the Depression never mention that fact.

Congress gave the president the power first to seize the private gold holdings of American citizens and then to fix the price of gold. One morning, as Roosevelt ate eggs in bed, he and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau decidedto change the ratio between gold and paper dollars. After weighing his options, Roosevelt settled on a 21 cent price hike because “it’s a lucky number.”

In his diary, Morgenthau wrote, "If anybody ever knew how we really set the gold price through a combination of lucky numbers, I think they would be frightened.”21 Roosevelt also single-handedly torpedoed the London Economic Conference in 1933, which was convened at the request of other major nations to bring down tariff rates and restore the gold standard. Washington and its reckless central bank had already made mincemeat of the gold standard by the early 1930s. Roosevelt’s rejection of it removed most of the remaining impediments to limitless currency and credit expansion, for which the nation would pay a high price in later years in the form of a depreciating currency. Sen. Carter Glass put it well when he warned Roosevelt in early 1933: “It’s dishonor, sir. This great government, strong in gold, is breaking its promises to pay gold to widows and orphans to whom it has sold government bonds with a pledge to pay gold coin of the present standard of value. It is breaking its promise to redeem its paper money in gold coin of the present standard of value. It’s dishonor, sir.”

FDR talked Congress into creating Social Security in 1935 and imposing the nation’s first comprehensive minimum wage law in 1938. While to this day he gets a great deal of credit for these two measures from the general public, many economists have a different perspective. The minimum wage law prices many of the inexperienced, the young, the unskilled and the disadvantaged out of the labor market. (For example, the minimum wage provisions passed as part of another act in 1933 threw an estimated 500,000 african americans out of work).24 And current studies and estimates reveal that Social Security has become such a longterm actuarial nightmare that it will either have to be privatized or the already high taxes needed to keep it afloat will have to be raised to the stratosphere.

Many modern historians tend to be reflexively anti-capitalist and distrustful of free markets; they find Roosevelt’s exercise of power, constitutional or not, to be impressive and historically “interesting.” In surveys, a majority consistently rank FDR near the top of the list for presidential greatness, so it is likely they would disdain the notion that the New Deal was responsible for prolonging the Great Depression. But when a nationally representative poll by the American Institute of Public Opinion in the spring of 1939 asked, “Do you think the attitude of the Roosevelt administration toward business is delaying business recovery?” the American people responded “yes” by a margin of more than 2-to-1. The business community felt even more strongly so.

In his private diary, FDR’s very own Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, seemed to agree. He wrote: “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!”

At the end of the decade and 12 years after the stock market crash of Black Thursday, 10 million Americans were jobless. The unemployment rate was in excess of 17 percent. Roosevelt had pledged in 1932 to end the crisis, but it persisted two presidential terms and countless interventions later.

[Censored by Laurie]

I would have thought that as a cop, you would be a first hand witness to the lazy and unmotivated that suck government funds from taxpayers. If you think I was trying to imply that everyone who is poor is lazy, it was not my intention. But, you cannot deny that many of them are.

I love the idea of a bunch of middle-class white men discussing with absolute certainty the causes and factors contributing to the poverty in this country.

If we could discuss "Does pregnancy hurt, and if so, how much?" next...I would love to hear some of your insights.

[UNT90]

2. Healthcare would be a much broader scope. The term "Universal" comes to mind.

Perfect example of liberalism run amok. First, you compare health care to municipally funded services. These are funded by a group of people (citizen of said city) who have chosen to live in a certain community based on what that community has to offer (tax rates, schools, police, fire, etc...). This has absolutely NOTHING to do with the federal government. Then, when this is pointed out, you simply say expand it to the federal level. This is the definition of liberalism, and to a lesser extend, socialism. When does the expansion of government stop? Maybe next I should expect them to pay for my car, gas, education (oh, wait, already covered), salary, and alcohol.

Who do you think would do a better job of administering municipal services, the federal government or your city council?