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Essay on FDR Had the Right Idea

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Protesters are swarming the capitol city. They are flooding the entrances and lobbies of major government buildings. Thousands have set up makeshift camps. They will not leave until they get what they want. The president is dumbfounded. He wonders how things could have gotten to this point so quickly. His military advisors are prepared to sweep out the protesters with horses and tanks. The president orders the military to act. From that moment on, whether he knows it or not, his presidency is at an end. This is not the story of Hosni Mubarak, President of Egypt, in 2011; it is the story of Herbert Hoover, President of the United States, in 1932. Hoover had tried to battle the Great Depression, but his programs weren’t powerful …show more content…

FDR’s policies put an end to Bonus Marchers, Food Riots and radical politics that had sprung up with revolutionary zeal in reaction to Herbert Hoover’s meager, snail-paced recovery measures. To that generation of Americans, Franklin Roosevelt saved the country in a way comparable only to Abraham Lincoln.
Barack Obama’s policies are still in effect and apparently working. The proof is in, government spending cures an economy, just like John Maynard Keynes says. But, are Obama’s policies working? Princeton University Professor Alan S. Binder and Moody Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi published “How the Great Recession Was Brought to an End” in July, 2010. They calculated the effectiveness of various parts of President Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 package with a comparison of how much each type of economic policy actually translated into an economic benefit – how much bang did each buck provide. Binder and Moody calculated “The bang for the buck is estimated by the one year $ change in GDP for a given $ reduction in federal tax revenue or increase in spending”. Binder and Moody first looked at tax cuts, a popular Republican type of stimuli. For every dollar spent in temporary tax cuts, the average benefit to the economy was only 82 cents. Permanent tax cuts yielded even less benefit with a return of only 38 cents on the dollar. Obama’s ARRA Assistance related stimuli yielded an

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