Country can’t cut out of woes

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After the administrations of Harding and Coolidge, noteworthy for low taxes and minimal regulation, Hoover came into office in 1928 and cut spending and instituted “austerity measures.” In 1932, when FDR was elected, the unemployment rate was 23.6 percent, 37 percent for non-farm workers. He raised taxes on the wealthy, and with his alphabet soup of direct hiring programs, by 1937 he had unemployment down to 14.8 percent. In 1937, a Republican congress, thinking the Depression was over, forced cuts to Government spending and attempted to balance the budget. The unemployment rate went, immediately, to 19 percent. FDR re-instituted his hiring programs, and by the start of WWII, the unemployment rate was down to a famous 12.8 percent. Arguably, WWII was the largest Government-spending jobs program ever, and the effective unemployment rate went down below 2 percent. In addition, after the war, our National Debt had reached 125 percent of GDP (currently it is 82 percent of GDP). Both Truman and Eisenhower continued government spending, created the GI bill, educated our soldiers and helped them to purchase houses. They hired people to build our infrastructure. They brought us through the greatest growth period in US history. Hate FDR if you want, but there has never, in the history of the world, ever been a country that has “cut” its way out of a recession. Clifford Lanxner, Applegate