Talk:New Deal/Archive 1

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What *were* the legislative measures?

WRT their effectiveness, did they actually make the Depression worse, reduce its severity, or have no effect whatsoever? How politically popular was it at the time?

--Robert Merkel

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Well, the article was a stub and it did little to answer the questions. I've added much more, hoping that I can better answer them. 172

BTW, there is still a large unfinished chunk pertaining to the failures of the NIRA. Just to make this clear before people get in an uproar over missing history. 172

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This article is really nice now. I am no economist, but isn't this at least a moderately controversial POV statement:

    It was World War II, not the New Deal, which finally ended the crisis.

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"Never willing to lose the support of Southern Democrats, he declined to support legislation making lynching while—perhaps hypocritically—denouncing lynching in speeches."

Is this supposed to read "he declined to support legislation making lynching illegal"? A word seems to be missing, but not being an expert on the subject, I'm not sure.

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In the article is the following paragraph:

"Three days later, Roosevelt sent to Congress the Emergency Banking Act, a generally conservative bill, drafted in large part by holdovers from the Hoover administration, designed primarily to protect large banks from being dragged down by the failing smaller ones. The bill provided for Treasury Department inspection of all banks before they would be allowed to reopen, for federal assistance to tottering large institutions, and for a thorough reorganization of those in greatest difficulty. A confused and frightened Congress passed the bill within four hours of its introduction. Three-quarters of the banks in the Federal Reserve System reopened within the next three days, and $1 billion in hoarded currency and gold flowed back into them within a month. The immediate banking crisis was over."

There should be some mention that the inflows of gold were largely due to FDR making the holding of most forms of gold illegal - he confiscated gold, and offered paper currency in exchange at the rate of 1toz = $20.67. Due to FDR, for 40 years it was a felony for Americans to own monetary gold.

Also the words "hoarded currency and gold" is tautological, since at the time currency was defined in terms of gold - 1toz = $20.67.

Furthermore, there is no mention of the fact that FDR debased US currency shortly afterward, so that 1toz = $35. Doing this after confiscating gold almost doubled the Federal reserve's dollar holdings, and was to the detriment of all the people who handed in gold at the previous rate of exchange.

Strangely, the article also fails to mention that the Supreme Court declared FDR's "New Deal" Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) unconstitutional in early 1936.

The AAA was a plan to raise the cost of farm produce. The AAA paid farmers who destroyed their crops and buried their livestock while US citizens were starving in the streets. These facts also seem to have missed inclusion in this article.

Throughout the article, but particularly in the section "Conclusions", there needs to be some NPOV, currently there is none but strongly leftist dogma.

There is the alternate view that The New Deal was a form of government economic planning which goes back to the 1920s, to World War I, to Italian Fascism, to Soviet Communism, and to World War II economic controls. Fascism was on its way to being discredited and was already in ill repute before the New Deal programs were enacted.

There is the understanding that New Deal has it's roots in national socialism, which failed in Britain and led to massive oppression in the desperate effort to make it work in the Soviet Union. Consequently there exists the POV that the New Deal interventions extended the depression many years longer than were necessary.

The article does not reflect a neutral POV.

The article is full of keynesian shit. The new deal only worsened the matters, and surely didn't prove keynesian economics (that still worsened the matters) correct. That's just my POV based on what I understand of the situation, but I fully agree, this is far away from NPOV. --Lussmu 21:40, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)

There is extensive debate on this subject. The article causes of the Great Depression helps shed light on it. JBurnham 21:43, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

"But the most important achievement of 1935, and perhaps the New Deal as a whole, was the Social Security Act (August 14), which established a system of old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and welfare benefits for such protected groups as dependent children and the handicapped. It established a framework that shaped the U.S. welfare system through the remainder of the country."

Could someone clarify that the last word here should indeed be 'country' and not 'century'. If so, then from where did the SSA originate?

Problem fixed. 172 15:46, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:New Deal/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

I must object to the bald contention in the article on the New Deal that Alger Hiss was a communist mole in FDR's Administration. This remains highly controversial, as Wikipedia's own entry on Hiss makes clear.

Last edited at 02:06, 11 March 2007 (UTC). Substituted at 21:46, 3 May 2016 (UTC)