A Jan. 9 CNSNews.com article by Nicholas Ballasy takes a stab at forwarding the current right-wing meme of denouncing Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal as insufficient to pull America out of the Great Depression.
In an apparent attempt to counter Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman’s claim that FDR “did not spend what was needed” to get people “back to work” during the Great Depression, Ballasy asserts: “Despite the $500 billion spend under FDR through various programs, the unemployment rate in the United States did not significantly decrease until after the U.S. officially entered World War II in 1941.” This is then followed by government unemployment statistics from the era.
But those statistics — which show an unemployment rate decrease from 24.9 percent in 1933 to 14.3 percent in 1937 — prove Ballasy wrong. How is an a drop of 40 percent not “significant”? Ballasy doesn’t explain.
Further, Ballasy fails to note that the federal government’s 1930s unemployment statistics are misleading because they did not count those working in government work programs as employed — which means that the unemployment rate was even lower in 1937 than the statistics show, and that Ballasy will admit.
UPDATE: CNS also claimed in a Dec. 9 article by Matt Hadro that “government data show that FDR’s programs did not substantially reduce unemployment,” also without an explanation as to why a 40 percent-plus drop in unemployment between 1933 and 1937 is not considered “substantial.”