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Monday 4 May 2009

New Deal programs have, in fact, an impressive record of accomplishment. In terms of what we today call stimulus, they decreased unemployment and increased production and general wellbeing remarkably. Between FDR’s inauguration and 1936, production doubled. Unemployment fell from 25 percent to under 10 percent in that period. Incidentally, according to James Galbraith’s recent testimony before the Senate Committee on Banking, the charge that the New Deal did not increase employment radically rests on a truly absurd maneuver: the critics don’t count federal WPA and PWA employment. This is like counting a construction worker building a military airplane under a government contract with a private company as employed while categorizing a worker building the Lincoln Tunnel and paid directly by the federal government as unemployed. Linda Gordon

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