The Biggest Scam of All

UPDATE: Amity Shlaes, who has written a book on The Depression, The Forgotten Man:

One evening in the 1930s, a 13-year-old named William Troeller hanged himself from the transom of his bedroom in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

William's father was laid up in Kings County Hospital awaiting surgery for an injury he'd suffered on the job at Brooklyn Edison. A federal jobs program was paying William's older brother Harold for temporary work. But the amount wasn't nearly enough to make ends meet. Gas and electricity to the family's apartment had been shut off for half a year. Harold told a New York Times reporter that both hunger and modesty had driven William to act. "He was reluctant about asking for food," read the headline in the paper.

The surprising part of this story is not that it happened; most Americans know that after the 1929 stock-market crash, hard times sometimes led to suicide. The surprising part is that William Troeller killed himself not in 1930, when Herbert Hoover was president, but in 1937, in Franklin D. Roosevelt's second term. The New Deal was almost five years old, but the economy was not back. In fact, the country seemed farther from recovery than before. A new sense of futility was overcoming Americans. The British magazine the Economist sneered that the United States "seemed to have forgotten, for the moment, how to grow."

The date matters, because our new president has made it clear that his model is Roosevelt.

***Stealing our money, our children's future, for a "stimulus" that won't work. The biggest scam of all, illustrated.

Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen of Illinois is rolling over in his grave. "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money." Now it's trillions--and for what?

Via Suitably Flip, HT Anatreptic.

UPDATE: James Pethokoukis, US News--less than 25% of Obama's plan is actually stimulus. WSJ, How government prolonged the Depression:

The New Deal is widely perceived to have ended the Great Depression, and this has led many to support a "new" New Deal to address the current crisis. But the facts do not support the perception that FDR's policies shortened the Depression, or that similar policies will pull our nation out of its current economic downturn.

The goal of the New Deal was to get Americans back to work. But the New Deal didn't restore employment. In fact, there was even less work on average during the New Deal than before FDR took office. Total hours worked per adult, including government employees, were 18% below their 1929 level between 1930-32, but were 23% lower on average during the New Deal (1933-39). Private hours worked were even lower after FDR took office, averaging 27% below their 1929 level, compared to 18% lower between in 1930-32. [snip]

So what stopped a blockbuster recovery from ever starting? The New Deal. [snip]

The "recession in a depression" thus was not the result of a reversal of New Deal policies, as argued by some, but rather a deepening of New Deal polices that raised wages even further above their competitive levels, and which further prevented the normal forces of supply and demand from restoring full employment. Our research indicates that New Deal labor and industrial policies prolonged the Depression by seven years.

SEVEN YEARS. And even Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post, "Obama didn't make the tough choices". Go back to the drawing board Mr. President.