Good for What Ails You

The New Deal

The New Deal was a product of the Great Depression. President Franklin D. Roosevelt enacted most of the components in his years in office. When the Great Depression hit, President Hoover struggled to fend off disaster. The economic crisis spurred a replacement of the Republican presidency and the Republican Congress. The New Deal, then, was an attempt to counter the Great Depression. The New Deal brought a series of short-term and long-lasting conditions that didn't exist previously. In the New Deal the government eliminated the gold standard. Gold reserves no longer backed the currency. The CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, was created to give jobs to unskilled workers. The Social Security Act started deducting money from employers and employees to pay for financial assistance to the elderly and handicapped. The FDIC was created to prevent further collapse of banks. The Fair Labor Standards Act created a minimum wage, set the maximum standard work week at 40 hours, and eliminated child labor. The Tennessee Valley Authority was instituted in 1933 to build dams to generate electricity. The National Labor Relations Act (later modified by the Taft-Hartley Act) assured workers the right to form unions. While the New Deal did focus on fiscal conservatism, its fundamental basis was largely Keynesian economics which holds that a government can encourage economic growth in the private sector primarily by spending and taxation. And while historians are basically unanimous in their opinion that the New Deal brought an end to the Great Depression, economists aren't so clear.

The Great Society

The Great Society was brought about by President Lyndon B. Johnson. He carried out measures that President Kennedy had tried to put in place but was stopped by a Congress that wasn't Democratically controlled. After Kennedy's death, a landslide for the Democrats in 1964 gave Johnson the power he needed to enact this plan. The two primary targets in this process were to eliminate poverty and racial injustice. The measures he enacted included things like the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 which created the "Office of Economic Opportunity." The OEO was put in place to oversee community-based anti-poverty programs. Programs like VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), Food Stamps, and Project Head Start were created. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 allowed the federal government to put money into schools with a special emphasis on low-income and special-needs education and the Higher Education Act of 1965 allowed the government to make scholarship money available for lower-income students. Medicare/Medicaid were initiated to give medical coverage to seniors. To fight racial inequality, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. This prohibited hiring practices based on race. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 assured minorities the right to vote. Other things like the NEA, PBS, and NPR (along with other three-letter acronymns) were established in the Great Society. And there was a whole set of Acts passed that dealt with the environment ... all this amid the unpopular and expensive Vietnam War. History hasn't resolved the question of the effectiveness of the Great Society. Poverty still exists. The cost of these initiatives has been staggering. Medicare and Medicaid costs have increased and drained funds from Social Security to the point of nearly bankrupting both programs. But racism has radically declined and no one would argue that race should play a part in hiring practices or that race should be a factor in voting rights.

So ... who cares? Well, the last two times that we had a Democratic president with a Democrat-controlled Congress, we got the New Deal and the Great Society. Both offered solutions to your problems. Both operated on the belief that government was the answer. Both believed that it was best to take money from the people for their own good. Both tended toward a more socialist approach to life. And while both appeared to solve some problems, the long-term negative effects haven't stopped. So you decide. You can expect the same given a Democratic president and a Democrat-controlled Congress. In fact, we've been promised several similar things. So, are these wonderful solutions or at some point is the cure worse than the illness?