SmartRemarks

Wednesday was Barack Obama’s 100th day in office. Everyone else has been talking about it. Why not me?

A hundred days is a pretty arbitrary number, of course. But ever since FDR used it as a marker in 1933 for taking quick action against the Depression, it’s been a convenient hook on which to hang stories about new presidents. Few of them compare to FDR, of course. Then again, few are up against the kind of problems he was.

These days, though, the times make the comparison seem a bit more apropos.

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There’s been a lot of interesting political commentary going on this past week (just check out the industrious writers on my blogroll), but I admit that I haven’t felt inspired to chime in on it. Sometimes the weight of public affairs just seems overwhelming, and it helps to step back and focus on personal matters. However, there is one political meme that keeps recurring lately, in the public discourse and thus, also, in the back of my mind. It’s ubiquitous in the establishment press and on the internet; it came up repeatedly last week in Obama’s second press conference, and again today on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. And it’s certainly prominent in Congress.

Here’s the meme:  that Obama’s budget is too ambitious, since it dramatically increases the national debt (by what the CBO projects to be $9.3 trillion over ten years, as has been widely reported). That we’re all “fiscal conservatives” who naturally agree that deficit spending is A Bad Thing, and therefore that Congress clearly needs to scale spending back from what Obama has proposed.

There’s a simple question going unasked here:  why? Nothing about this meme is as self-evident as those who echo it seem to assume. 

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I’ve already alluded to the right wing’s attempts to spread misinformation about the New Deal and the Great Depression. The mass media echo chamber has been full of them lately, and I’ve linked to a couple of items that have been rowing against the tide. I have perhaps been too casual about assuming that everyone is familiar with the real story, however. A careful look at some empirical truth is called for here, if we are to learn the correct lessons applicable to our current situation.

So let’s revisit those two links in greater detail. A few diligent scholars and journalists have done their homework so you and I don’t have to.

First, from economist Charles McMillion’s essay entitled “The ‘FDR Failed’ Myth” (emph. mine):

[I]t is imperative to expose a dangerous popular myth regarding the efficacy of President Roosevelt’s actions: that it was not the programs of the New Deal, but only the placing of the nation on a wartime footing years later, that restored the health of the nation’s economy.

This belief, though widely held, cannot stand up to even the most basic economic analysis. Yet the mainstream corporate media, which abound with anti-government ideology, seek to reinforce this myth. Just this past Sunday, The Washington Post featured on Page One of its Outlook section an article by Amity Shlaes headlined “FDR Was a Great Leader, But His Economic Plan Isn’t One to Follow.” …

The basic economic facts from the 1930s—according to the Department of Commerce, the Federal Reserve, and other official sources—are fundamentally different from the unsupported claims put forward by Shlaes and prominent in popular myth. The monthly data for industrial production show a near three-year collapse under President Hoover, ending when FDR came to office in March 1933. Production rocketed by 44 percent in the first three months of the New Deal and, by December 1936, had completely recovered to surpass its 1929 peak.

GDP, only available as annual averages, plunged 25.6 percent from 1929-1932, including by 13.0 percent in 1932. It stabilized in 1933, and then soared by 10.8 percent, 8.9 percent and 12.0 percent, respectively, in 1934, 1935 and 1936. Real GDP surpassed its 1929 peak in 1936 and never again fell below it. After-tax personal income, consumer spending, real private investment and jobs all reached or surpassed their 1929 peaks by late 1936.

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