The Left Looks Backward (Again)

Professor Thomas DiLorenzo reports:

The Green New Deal is a bundle of absurdities founded on a fallacy. The fallacy is that the original New Deal saved America from the Great Depression. It did not. In 1929 the U.S. unemployment rate was 3.2% and skyrocketed to 24.9% by 1933. But by 1938, after five years of the New Deal, the unemployment rate was still 19% and was stuck at 14.6% in 1940 on the eve of World War II. The Great Depression did not end until the war was over, the military was demobilized, and the federal budget was cut by about two-thirds from 1945 to 1948. The year 1946 was the most vigorous year of private-sector economic growth in all of American history, with private consumption and investment spending increasing by 30%. No other year has ever come close.

That the New Deal not only did not end the Great Depression but made it more severe and longer-lasting has become the accepted wisdom of the economics profession. In a 2004 article in the prestigious American Economic Review economists Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian concluded that “New Deal policies did not lift the economy out of the Depression . . . the abandonment of these policies coincided with the strong recovery of the 1940s” (emphasis added).

An article well worth your time.