Roosevelt didn’t end Great Depression

Democrats claim, with metaphysical certitude, that Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt ended the Great Depression with massive federal spending. Let us review the numbers for unemployment association with the relevant years.

In 1913, Democratic President Woodrow Wilson and his friends created the Federal Reserve Bank system. The sole reason for its existence, they said, was to stop recessions and depressions by stabilizing the money supply. In 1929, the stock market crashed, during the administration of Republican Herbert Hoover. The unemployment rate was 3.2 percent. That is remarkably low, since the normal, “frictional” rate is 4 percent.

In 1930, the unemployment rate shot up to 8.9 percent, because Hoover tried to spend the national economy into a recovery.

In 1933, the unemployment rate shot up to 25 percent, because Hoover’s spending did not work. In the 1932 election, FDR blasted Hoover for spending and taxing too much, boosting the national debt, chocking off trade and putting millions on the dole.

FDR charged Hoover with creating, “the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all history.” At that time, the Democratic platform called for a 25 percent reduction in spending, a balanced budget and sound gold currency.

FDR did just the opposite. He drastically increased taxes and spending, creating the New Deal.

In 1935, unemployment dropped to 18 percent. In 1936, unemployment dropped to 14 percent. In 1938, it went back up to 20 percent. In 1941, 12 years after the stock market crash, unemployment stood at 17 percent.

In other words, the Great Depression did not end with World War II and the massive removal of men from the labor force into the military. FDR and the Democrats not only failed to end Hoover’s depression, but turned it into a Great Depression, beginning with an unemployment rate of 8.9 percent in 1930 and 17 percent in 1941.

George Kocan

Warrenville