>Because three years of Hoover's laissez faire policies after the crash had done so much to help the country get moving again and FDR's programs came in and turned all that progress around. Yeah, right.
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>But if FDR hadn't interferred, the depression would have been over sooner. You can't spend your way out of this economic crisis - especially when you consider that people spending money that they didn't have (and could never pay back) was what got us into this mess. Fixing the problem by vastly increasing our national debt is like trying to put out a fire by pouring gasoline on it.

What FDR did was get people working and, in many cases, get them working for the public good. People were, literally (using that word as it's really meant to be used, not as it's used today) starving. Hoover did essentially nothing.

There is no evidence that the depression would have been over sooner without intervention, and of course, without the structural modifications that came with the New Deal, the same dangers would have still be in place.

Did you know, for example, that before the Great Depression, most home mortgages were not amortizing? You paid interest for the term of the loan and when it expired, you had to get a new loan. No payoff of principal.

The FDIC allowed people to trust banks with their money again.

Even something like the Federal Writers Project and the other similar projects of the WPA left our country immeasurably enriched with their results.

The New Deal was a good deal for Americans.

>Tamar, you have children. Don't your worry about what piling all this debt on top of them is going to do to their futures?

Yes, of course I do. I was one of those screaming when the previous administration was running up that debt with a useless war. Had Bush not felt the need to avenge his father, we could have spent the last eight years reducing the national debt instead of increasing it. Then, if this downturn had occurred, we'd have been in a much better place to start with.

Sadly, there's nothing we can do about that now. But the reality is that the government is the only thing big enough to get the economy moving again, so this new debt is an investment in the future of our country and the world.

Tamar