"FDR's New Deal Worked. We Need Another One."
So says the headline of one of Noah Smith's recent Bloomberg columns. The subheadline adds that "Claims that the programs adopted in the 1930s lengthened the Great Depression don't hold up." For good measure Smith adds that such claims are only encountered "in certain right-wing circles and among a few contrarian economists."
Far from being novel, Smith's rhapsodic view of the New Deal represents today's conventional wisdom, hundreds of instances of which might be gathered from the popular press and elsewhere. Here are a few:
Without Roosevelt's intervention, the economic recovery that lasted from 1933 to 1937 would have been weaker and shorter — not unlike our own recovery after the Great Recession" and "Any who doubt the New Deal's effectiveness need only look at the double-dip recession of 1937, after a conservative backlash in Congress scaled down relief spending." (David Weiman, Imagining a World Without the New Deal, The Washington Post, August 12, 2011.)
"President Roosevelt enacted the New Deal, a fiscal and legislative tour de force that…ultimately set the conditions for America's economic recovery in time to mobilize the country for World War II." (The New Deal's lessons can guide us into a post-pandemic economy" Sherri Goodman and Greg Douquet, The Hill, May 14, 2020.)
"FDR and his team launched the New Deal to help get the country back on its feet. They succeeded, yet the myth persists that the New Deal had little effect on economic recovery and only World War II ended the Depression." (Did the New Deal Cure the Great Depression? Richard Walker, The Living New Deal, December 15, 2015.)
"I think to really get the economy running again, we'll need either some sort of New New Deal or we'll just have to wait a decade or more." (Mathew Jackson, quoted in A Stanford economist says we're headed for a crisis worse than the Great Depression. Here's his plan for getting people back to work and spending on businesses., Marguerite Ward, Business Insider, April 21, 2020.)
Believe me, I could locate and insert a dozen more, all from the last several years, in half as many minutes.