Obama's New New Deal No Better Than the Old One

With victory in sight, Barack Obama's supporters are predicting that he will give us a new New Deal. To see what that might mean, let's look back on the original New Deal.

The purpose of New Deal legislation was not, as commonly thought, to restore economic growth but rather to freeze the economy in place at a time when it seemed locked in a downward spiral. Its central program, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), created 700 industry councils for firms and unions to set minimum prices and wages. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), the ancestor of our farm bills, limited production to hold up prices. Unionization, encouraged by NRA and the 1935 Wagner Act, was meant to keep workers in jobs that the unemployed would have taken at lower pay.

These policies did break the downward spiral. But, as Amity Shlaes points out in "The Forgotten Man," they failed to restore growth. Double-digit unemployment continued throughout the 1930s; despite population growth, the economy failed to rebound to 1920s production levels. High taxes on high earners (a Herbert Hoover as well as Franklin Roosevelt policy) financed welfare payments ("spread the wealth around") but reduced investment and growth.

The political verdict was negative. New Dealers were whalloped in the 1938 off-year elections. Polls show that Democrats would have lost the White House in 1940 if that election had been decided on domestic issues. But war loomed. France fell in June 1940, just before America's two national party conventions, and Adolf Hitler and his then-ally Joseph Stalin controlled most of the landmass of Eurasia. Republicans did not have an experienced leader in this world crisis -- Democrats did: Franklin Roosevelt, who cynically engineered his nomination for a third term and then swept to victory on foreign policy.

Roosevelt had thought that economic expansion was a thing of the past. But World War II stimulated huge growth in the American economy. New Deal welfare programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) arts program were terminated. Wartime domestic policies were growth stimulators. Veterans Administration home mortgage loans, building on the FHA mortgage program, encouraged home-buying and after the war converted a nation of renters to a nation of homeowners. The G.I. Bill of Rights subsidized higher education for millions of veterans. These programs stimulated growth partly because they required real effort -- down payments, military service -- from beneficiaries before they received aid.