CNSNews.com ups the ante in its misleading attack on the New Deal with a Jan. 12 article by Josiah Ryan, who quotes Burt Folsom, “a professor of history at Hillsdale College,” saying that “old New Deal didn’t work” and paraphrases Folsom as making the utterly false statement that the New Deal “never did reduce unemployment.”
In fact, unemployment dropped more than 40 percent between 1933 and 1937 and — according to federal employment statistics CNS itself has cited (misleading as they are, since they don’t count those in government work programs as employed) — remained below the 1933 high throughout Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency.
That would seem to prove that the New Deal did reduce unemployment, no?