The New Deal
eighty seven years ago our country underwent what we call the Great Depression. After a decade of a successful future our country was thrown into despair the day of the stock market crash, which led us into the Great Depression. Banks began to close and people became unemployed which led the US to a dark time. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt entered the White house in 1932 he promised a New Deal for the American people. He explained that the New Deal would deliver relief, recovery and reform. However through Burton Folsom Jr. Book “New Deal or Raw Deal?” We have come to find that Roosevelt’s New Deal did not recover the economy like he set out to do. Treasury Secretary Henry J. Morgenthau Jr. who was known as Roosevelt’s best friend testified before the House Ways and Means committee stating “I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started… And an enormous debt to boot” unemployment rates exceeded 20 percent. Instead of building the economy’s wealth Roosevelt plummeted them. He also promised Jobs to help with social reform. As we all should know government spending’s do not allow more employment. Henry Hazlitt an American philosopher said during this time "Every dollar of government spending must be raised through a dollar of taxation, for example, every public job created by the bridge project a private job has been destroyed somewhere else… All that has happened, at best, is that there has been a diversion of jobs because of the project.” Meaning Roosevelt was not really creating jobs; he had opened little to no opportunity for some people while shutting doors for others. FDR also managed to divide the government during this time, which created many problems for the country. The government was now committed to providing at least minimal assistance to the poor and unemployed, protect the rights of labor union, stabilize the banking system, build low-income housing, regulate financial markets, subsidize