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."
