Making It Up

by digby

Stirling Newberry has written an interesting historical piece on why this nonsense about how the New Deal was a failure. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but this is particularly interesting to me:

In the US it was realized that the great pressure on people who are unemployed is debt, this is why they undertook debt relief, the real thing, by programs such as the HOLC. Why didn’t it lead to recovery sooner? Why, an outbreak of economic orthodoxy led to balancing the budget in 1937, and plunged the economy into a second recession. But the architecture of the New Deal held, waiting for the moment when it could uncoil and create a new economic order which survives to this day. What the right wing, then, and now, played on was jealousy of working people for each other. It was Boss Tweed that observed that you can always hire one half of the poor to kill the other half of the poor. Let’s not fall into that trap.

Right wing governments often actually institutionalize such things, and some did, during the Great Depression. It didn’t work out very well for them — or anyone else. We dodged a bullet on that one, thank goodness. For now, at least.