>>>>That's what's happening now, isn't it? Please thank them for me for nothing.
>>>>
>>>>The roots of todays ecomomic crisis go all the back to FDR and his New Deal. So please thank the Dems for me.
>>>
>>>Now there is a reach back into the distant past. Most reflexive Republicans put it on Bill Clinton.
>>>
>>>Thinking about it, though, FDR faced exactly the same situation Obama inherited. History remembers his "ceaseless, relentless tinkering" (wasn't that his phrase?) with the economy pulling us out of the Depression. It wasn't exactly like that. Nothing he tried really worked. The economy remained the pits for the first 9 years of his presidency. Then a wonderful thing happened: Pearl Harbor was bombed. Factories geared up with the war effort, everyone was at work again, and we entered an age of unprecedented prosperity that lasted for decades. I hope it doesn't take that for Obama to enjoy similar success.
>>
>>Depends on who's research you're going on. Others have said that FDR's programs WOULD have worked had they not been stopped by other causes.
>
>Could be. I thought there was broad agreement among economists that FDR didn't make much of a dent in the depression until the war started.

What the practical difference between programs that "would have worked" and progarms that "did not work"? One would expect that events happened 70 years back could be settled on factual result basis, not on some assumptions what would happen if something could happen.
Please, note that FDR operated in much friendlier, by basic accounting standards, environment. In other words he didn't have a country swarmed by debt, and he was still very moderate, by today's standards, in making more debt.