Obama might be the dumbest president we have ever had.

[Avinash_Tyagi]

Jackson50 said:

Avinash_Tyagi said:

Senlis said:

Avinash_Tyagi said:
FDR didn't cause the great depression, he wasn't even in office until years after it began.

As for prolonging it, the only thing he did that prolonged it was trying to balance the budget and cut government spending in 1937

My mistake, I was typing this at work and got my sentances mixed up.

Hoover caused the great depression.  FDR prolonged it.  Look at this article by economist Thomas Sowell

http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2008/12/23/another_great_depression?page=1

"The Vedder and Gallaway statistics allow us to follow unemployment month by month. They put the unemployment rate at 5 percent in November 1929, a month after the stock market crash. It hit 9 percent in December-- but then began a generally downward trend, subsiding to 6.3 percent in June 1930.

That was when the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were passed, against the advice of economists across the country, who warned of dire consequences.

Five months after the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, the unemployment rate hit double digits for the first time in the 1930s."

[...]

"The stock market crash, which has been blamed for the widespread suffering during the Great Depression of the 1930s, created no unemployment rate that was even half of what was created in the wake of the government interventions of Hoover and FDR.

Politically, however, Franklin D. Roosevelt could not have been more successful. After all, he was the only President of the United States elected four times in a row. He was a master of political rhetoric."

[...]

"Today, increasing numbers of scholars recognize that FDR's own policies were a further extension of interventions begun under Hoover. Moreover, the temporary rise in unemployment after the stock market crash was nowhere near the massive and long-lasting unemployment after government interventions."

 

Recheck your history, first off the Tariff was passed in 1930, well before FDR was elected in 1932, secondly unemployment was over 23.6% before FDR was elected, during his first term in office he reduced it below 17%

No, FDR did not cause the GD, and it is incorrect to attribute the S-H Tariff to FDR. Nonetheless, I would be surprised if even the most staunch FDR supports would say that the only thing he did to prolong the GD was to cut spending and balance the budget. The NIRA, for instance, was a disastrous piece of legislation. It exempted companies from antitrust legislation and artificially inflated wages.

 

 

 And was struck down in 1935, you're really reaching if you think it had much of an effect