I’d go over there, but I don’t want to interrupt his Jonanism.

Mostly because if I were to see something like that, I’d go blind.

it gave big business unprecedented power to regulate itself, to the detriment of small businessmen.

Wait a minute… is he talking about the 1930’s or the 1980’s? I’m confused here.

This is one of those wingnut legends that make no actual sense in the real world, like supply-side economics.

I once had a chance to tour a Navy ship with a group that included a reasonably sophisticated Norwegian from some technical field. After we had had a chat with one of the senior officers, who kept alluding to the idea that Ronald Reagan had caused the Soviet Union to collapse, the Norwegian turned to me for an explanation. He was quite amazed at the whole idea, and I had to assure him several times that there really was a strain of thought in the United States that took seriously the notion that Reagan’s defense build-up and tough talk brought down the Evil Empire.

The things we in the reality-based community have to put up with!

I spent a year in England in 1990 and my high school classmates went to great lengths to convince me that the Americans prolonged WWII. “If you yanks had just kept your noses out of it we could have won it quicker.”

At first I thought they were being outlandish for the sake of it, but apparently there’s actually a theory out there.

The Tennessee Valley Authority – neither a valley, an authority or in Tennessee. Discuss.

It’s true! Also, the 16th Amendment didn’t allow Congress to institute the income tax, it merely allowed plutocrats to tax themselves, to the detriment of poor workers!

It would be so satisfying if an interviewer would try to pin Doughboy down, and ask him HOW Roosevelt prolonged the Depression. Tho I suppose you’d just get more blibber-blabber

“gave big business unprecedented power to regulate itself, to the detriment of small businessmen”

Isn’t that the wingnut ideal though? Is Jonah saying FDR wasn’t a really a fascist after all, but a free-market freedom lover? I’m confused.

In a few years they will start saying that President Obama actually prolonged the Iraq War by bringing our troops home, because the Global Islamisism was going to surrender any minute.

At least, I hope they say that, because then we can say STFU, instead of “Who the fuck keeps electing these guys?”

*sticks head under cold tap and cries*

At first I thought they were being outlandish for the sake of it, but apparently there’s actually a theory out there.

Yes, well… there are theories and there are theories crazy fucked-up-whacked-out ideas…

Imagine, if you will, a strikethrough appearing through the second ‘theories’…

Jonah has some of it right and all of it wrong. The New Deal did not prolong the Depression; and particularly that claim becomes quite a silly argument to make to begin demanding that the actual humans being helped out of the conditions which they suffered under the Depression was irrelevant.

No actual scholars believe that the New Deal sprung unheralded from the head of FDR like Athena from Zeus’ head. Maybe in Jonah’s little world of nepotized pseudo-scholars; in the real academic world, wings of libraries are filled with monographs on how a particular New Deal program grew out of some local precedent or previous study.

And how shockingly unshocking, given that FDR and his aides specifically and openly acknowledged that the controversial nature of doing anything about these enormous and systemic problems would require an approach likely to generate less fear — which is why they sought out existing and often well-accepted programs to either expand or use as a model. This is so freaking obvious that it would take someone like Goldbutt to proclaim it as an ingenious insight.

It is true that both (a) the New Deal didn’t do what many people thought it did (from anti-socialist liberals who think it permanently proved socialists wrong to right wingers who insist it proved Roosevelt a Communist), and that (b) the New Deal often empowered big business to participate in its own regulation.

From G. William Domhoff, “The Death of State Autonomy Theory: A Critique of Skocpol’s Protecting Soldiers And Mothers“

…the key programs that were adopted in 1935 were ones that (1) had been devised by corporate-oriented experts at Industrial Relations Counselors, Inc., and the Social Sciences Research Council; (2) were supported by such large Northern industrial firms as Standard Oil of New Jersey and General Electric; and (3) were acceptable to Southern Democratic plantation owners once their own labor force of agricultural, seasonal, and domestic workers was excluded from coverage.

In fact, the super-rich often were the ones most benefiting from the development of the U.S. which the New Deal and its related WWII industrial development created.

This surprises only idiots who are reacting to other people who believe that the New Deal was a socialist revolution which punished the rich and lifted the peasants up to sit upon golden thrones. Unsurprisingly, none of this was the upper-class Roosevelt’s goal.

However, it sure as hell did crack down on a lot of big business, which is why the National Review role of calling it all Communist was ably filled back then by none other than the National Association of Manufacturers.

From C. Wright Mills, Power Structure Research, and the Failures of Mainstream Political Science, by G. William Domhoff
in New Political Science 29 (2007), pp. 97-114

…to the degree that the liberal-labor coalition that developed during the New Deal could exercise any power, it had to do so inside the Democratic Party and in the context of a bargain with the segregationist Southern Democrats that included acquiescence in elite domination of the low-wage labor force in the South, especially African Americans. It also meant tacit acceptance of the exclusion of African Americans from craft unions and good jobs in the North, which assuaged the feelings of the many Northern white workers who saw African Americans as racially inferior or as potential threats to their job security.

Thus, the liberal-labor coalition, with fewer than a majority of senators and only 100 or so seats in the House, had far less power within the Democratic Party than liberal analysts and historians usually suggest. When it came to domestic spending, the liberal-labor coalition had to agree that the South received more than its share of the pork and that the Southern whites could exclude African Americans if they so desired (Brown, 1999). On the occasions when the Northern liberals could convince the urban machine Democrats to support them on an issue in opposition to the Southerners, the Southerners joined with Northern Republicans after 1938 in a highly successful conservative voting bloc to stop any legislation they did not like, which usually involved issues related to control of labor markets in both the North and the South (Manley, 1973; Patterson, 1981; Shelley, 1983)…

…If there is any doubt that the plantation capitalists and their elected representatives could have stopped the act cold, recall their close relationship with Franklin D. Roosevelt, their control of congressional committees through the seniority system, and their willingness to use the filibuster on issues of deadly concern to them, which in those days could not be ended with a vote. Perhaps the best proof of this analysis is that the brief usefulness of the National Labor Relations Act soon began a fateful decline when the Southerners turned against it in 1937 and 1938, due to their opposition to integrated organizing in the South and the use of sit-down strikes in the North by the militant Congress of Industrial Organizations. The handwriting was on the wall as early as 1939 when the Southern Democrats entered into negotiations with the ultraconservatives in the National Association of Manufacturers and the leaders of the American Federation of Labor, which was by then feeling threatened by the fast-growing Congress of Industrial Organizations, to decide on the changes in the law that became the Taft-Hartley Act. This handwriting was temporarily obscured by the need to delay the counterattack on labor until the successful completion of World War II (Gross, 1981).

Now, if Goldsphincter would like to suggest who are the new ultraconservatives whose Congressional support will be necessary for the New New Deal — who will portray the segregationist ultraconservative Southern Democrats — and whose objections to their specific labor control over their sectors of the country will hobble the entire American working class for generations, he’s more than welcome.

Jo’berg’s approach is to once again propose a fake surprising fact and then assume that this therefore undermines his opponents.

For example, he quotes a lot of people saying we now need a new New Deal. Then he points out — let’s ignore his nonsense about the New Deal prolonging the Depression –that the New Deal itself didn’t turn the United States into a perfect unending utopia so why do all these stupid-head libruls want a new one anyway since the firsh one din’t work so damn well huh huh?

And also Jo’butt’s ‘how can it be anyfing new since ‘new’ requires new stuff and planning requires planning which is the opposite of new and new isn’t planned and how come the libruls don’t want the reel new stuff like we crazy right wingers propose like school vouchers and stuff ’cause even though they all stupid and are the same Reaganite market fundamentalist crap we’ve spouted for 30 years and are the same junk that is causing all these problems please please see these are really the bold and new stuff the libruls won’t let you try!’ does not merit a response.

Icke argues that he has developed a moral and political worldview that combines New Age spiritualism with a passionate denunciation of what he sees as totalitarian trends in the modern world, a position that has been described as “New Age conspiracism.”

I had a roommate like that. We tried to help her as much as we could, but eventually we had to call some nice people to come pick her up and take her to L.A.
She’s with her own people now.

Let’s face it — Doughbob Loadpants is not exactly Howard Zinn…

Honestly, doughy really does have a reading comprehension problem. It’s a theory I’ve had for a while now and am really starting to believe. Has he ever been diagnosed with some sort of learning disorder?

Honestly, doughy really does have a reading comprehension problem. It’s a theory I’ve had for a while now and am really starting to believe. Has he ever been diagnosed with some sort of learning disorder?

He probably has dain brammage from Lucienne a.k.a. Teh Real Mommy Dearest smacking him upside the head every time he showed troubling signs of having an original thought.

Honestly, doughy really does have a reading comprehension problem. It’s a theory I’ve had for a while now and am really starting to believe. Has he ever been diagnosed with some sort of learning disorder?

I think that a lot of wingnuts are going to be exhibiting this problem as reality catches up with them. Especially with regards to economic issues I’ve encountered a rather large number of people for whom the facts simply do not apply. They seem bound and determined to be wrong.

Shouldn’t there be a restaurant at the end of the universe?

Anyway, thanks to Spawn of Lucianne for again helping to explain to us that ending the Depression prolonged the Depression, liberalism is fascism, up is down, black is white, war is peace, freedom is slavery,and ignorance is canteloupe.

I have no idea what point Goldberg is trying to make, since the quote is not in context, but there are elements of what he is saying that are correct. For instance, the NIRA code authorities were dominated by big businesses who wrote codes that would damage small businesses. This, in many ways, was in line with New Deal policy makers thinking which believed that cut throat competition among under-capitalized firms was helping drive down prices and wages to unacceptably low levels.

Also, the Social Security Act, by draining the economy of purchasing power through its payroll taxes, led directly to the Roosevelt recession of late 1937. As a piece of social justice legislation, the Social Security Act stands as America’s premier social program. But as a Depression fighting measure it was a disaster.

Wait a minute… is he talking about the 1930’s or the 1980’s? I’m confused here.

1930s, 1980s – who cares? Just remember that anti-fascist Benito Mussolini ordered neo-Nazi Abbie Hoffman to put LSD in the water supply prior to Woodrow Wilson’s mass brainwashing session at Woodstock, which is how the United States got involved in war with left-wing Nazi Germany. Later, when fascist JFK attacked the liberal, non-racist KKK, FDR passed the Emancipation Proclamation to undermine small businesses so the conservative Stalin could force everyone to buy gas at Texaco stations.

That’s what Jonah’s trying to say. Except that’s not what Jonah’s trying to say. Or both.

“it gave big business unprecedented power to regulate itself, to the detriment of small businessmen.”

I wonder if Prof. Loadpants is familiar with the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, the Trust Indenture Act of 1939, the Investment Company Act of 1940, or the Investment Advisers Act of 1940.

I further wonder if Herr Doughbob has ever asked ANY investment banker about the effect of said acts upon banks’ and companies’ abilities to “regulate themselves” to the detriment of small businessmen.

Of course he hasn’t. Only liberal fascists would dream of such a thing!

I’m gonna take the independent and well thought out position that El Cid knows a lot about shit….

mikey

I’m pretty sure it was poor people who prolonged the Great Depression. Hence the Right’s righteous campaign to punish and eliminate poor people, preferably through eating them.

I have no idea what point Goldberg is trying to make…

Jonah Goldberg doesn’t make points. He makes drool.

It’s like this. Roosevelt called his plan a New Deal. Other people use the term “New Deal.” Therefore liberals are fascists.

You, sir, have insulted drool.

You will have to answer for your insolence.

Choose your weapon. Shall it be silly string or Magic, the Gathering, at dawn?

mikey

The Queen. The Vatican. The Gettys. The Rothschilds. And Colonel Sanders before he went teats up.

Choose your weapon.

In honor of Jonah, a wet fart contest…

…but that’s an insult to self-respecting wet farts everywhere.

El Cid knows a lot about shit….
Yes, but how often is El Cid invited to take part in television debates on scatology?

And I base these statements on NOTHING WHATSOEVER. They are true BECAUSE I SAY THEM. THE ACT OF MY SPEAKING THIS HISTORY CREATES IT.

Shouldn’t there be a restaurant at the end of the universe?

At least a Starbucks, surely?

this is a meme being developed courtesy of this book, reviewed in last week’s nation.

i’m sure the book examines the topic as never before with such care, detail, etc., etc.

ack – don’t know what happened to the hyperlink. cut and paste here:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080407/phillips-fein

Jonah’s learned his debating techniques from flame wars on the Stile Project. Say whatever you want, no matter how nonsensical. Never present evidence — in fact, ignore all requests for evidence. Demand copious evidence from everyone else, and move the goalposts constantly. Declare victory no matter what. Collect a fat paycheck.

Jonah: “The sky is not blue. It is peppermint striped and filled with asparagus.”

Normal Person: “What the hell are you talking about?”

Jonah: “It is self-evident to anyone who is not a fascist.”

Normal Person: “You’re off your chum. Anyone who looks outside knows the sky is blue, unless it’s raining…”

Jonah: “So you admit the sky can be different colors. Thanks, I win.”

Normal Person: “…and I have no idea what you mean by asparagus. Asparagus grows in the ground, not the air.”

Jonah: “Do you have evidence of this? Approved by the President? Remember, the burden of proof is entirely on you.”

Normal Person: “I got a dictionary and an encyclopedia that back me up.”

Jonah: “So silly, asparagus is a mineral.”

Normal Person: “Wh-What?!”

Jonah: “You have no rebuttal? I win, on the ball, no erase-ums. Now to go cash my Monsanto check and coat myself in luxuriant cremes.”

The fact is, liberals have no use for facts, or reality. They are divorced from it. This is why we rule USA, the heartlanders.

I’ve no doubt that FDR made a fair number of mistakes in the New Deal, but Cap and Gown should at least try to nail down a few facts better. Given that the NIRA was overturned in 1935, and 1933-1935 were years of fairly decent economic recovery, whatever degree of “regulatory capture” or damage to small business might be hypothesized, it does not seem to have had a great effect on prolonging the Great Depression, and so does not support Goldberg’s argument in any way.

The second assertion, that Social Security taxes were somehow responsible for the secondary recession that occurred in 1937-1938 is also a little weird, given that Social Security (which began in 1935) was, at the time, a pay-as-you-go system, and put SS tax money back into the economy as rapidly as it was taken out. However, in 1937, owing to a fear of deficits, the Roosevelt administration cut federal spending, with a result that would come as no surprise to any Keynsean, including Richard Nixon: the economy shrank.

I will, however, accept C&G’s suggestion that he has no idea what point Goldberg is trying to make, as I doubt that Goldberg has a point, other than another hatchet swipe at liberalism.

“Still, it’s worth noting for the record that the New Deal didn’t really do what most of these people think it did. It didn’t, for example, end the Great Depression.”

I think it fed starving Americans.

James Killus appears to know something of the New Deal, but he is obviously no expert. I would highly recommend the following books:

Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order
Colin Gordon, New Deals
William Leuchtenburg Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal
Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform

Social Security was not a pay as you go system. The first payments were not scheduled to be paid out until 1942 so the system could build up a surplus. The 1937 recession was, as you say, the expected Keynsian result of higher taxes and lower government spending.

I am Helix. ROCK!

It’s gotten to the point where reading Jonah’s words causes my brain to threaten to jump out of my skull and run away.

Honestly, doughy really does have a reading comprehension problem. It’s a theory I’ve had for a while now and am really starting to believe. Has he ever been diagnosed with some sort of learning disorder?

I diagnose him with Severe Stupidity.

Whenever I see Goldberg I think he should appear over the caption “Stop Me Before I Eat Again”.

Cap & Gown has a point. The 1937 recession was largely due to a failure to spend enough, as many of Roosevelt’s own advisers pointed out at the time — given the new Social Security tax. But then, Roosevelt was only a President, not a king, so there were political realities to be dealt with.

Economist & Roosevelt adviser Lauch Currie:

From “Secretary of Economics”, Time, Monday, Jul. 24, 1939.

…in the spring of 1938, [Currie] wrote an influential memo on the Causes of the Recession. Its prime theses, now commonplace: 1) U. S. Social Security taxes took so much out of the public pocketbook that the Government’s net contribution was reduced during the crucial March-September period in 1937 to a monthly average of $60,000,000 from $335,000,000 during 1936. 2) “Compensatory” Federal spending to stimulate heavy industry might be more flexible if concentrated “in large part outside the regular budget.”

“Outside the regular budget” meaning the potential for deficit spending.

For the hell of it, let’s hear from some actual Marxists looking back on the origins of the U.S.’ Social Security system:

From “Social Security, the Stock Market, and the Elections,” by The Editors [no, not them, but Harry Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster], Monthly Review, October 2000.

In the social insurance schemes pioneered in Europe and existing in most industrialized countries, retirement benefits (and benefits associated with early death and disability) are paid to a considerable extent out of the general revenues of the government on a pay-as-you-go basis. But in the United States, the political climate during the New Deal forced the Roosevelt administration to concede to conservative demands that the costs of the system be borne entirely by workers and their employers through a regressive payroll tax specifically created for that purpose, and that a trust fund be set up to cover the resulting Old Age and Survivor’s Insurance. A separate, jointly administered trust fund for disability was added later. The Social Security trust fund was to be calculated with the view of accumulating a reserve fund, based on actuarial principles. Annual projections of its financial condition seventy-five years into the future were to be provided. For Roosevelt, these conditions (particularly the payroll tax), although insisted upon by capital, were seen as a means of safeguarding the system. “Those taxes,” he explained in a private exchange, “were never a problem of economics. They are politics all the way through. We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program” (quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Coming of the New Deal, pp. 308-309).

The 1937 recession was also due, in part, to the conservative Supreme Court’s having ruled against many of Roosevelt’s major economic reform programs. And Roosevelt’s own incorrect commitment to a balanced budget — urged upon him by mainly by conservatives.

You have to understand, that for the right wing and most economists, the legal strategy to fight & overturn the New Deal is as inspiring a story as is Charles Hamilton Houston’s strategy of overturning legal segregation by attacking “separate but equal”.

Per Brad DeLong:

From Right-Wing Anti-New Deal Litigation Strategy in the 1930s

There is an oral tradition at Cravath that Wood headed up a sophisticated long-term anti-New Deal litigation strategy: the fact that the named plaintiffs in the big anti-NRA case were orthodox butchers from Brooklyn is said to be no accident, but instead a successful attempt to pin Louis Brandeis by making him see the case as state power vs. the little guy from his minority religion, and not only to swing his vote but to curb his tongue from having its influence on the rest of the liberal wing of the court. And, indeed, in Schechter the NRA went down 9-0 (a blessing for the country).

Wood and company’s victory in Schechter in 1935 on the limits of the Commerce Clause and of the federal government’s ability to regulate the national economy was extended the following year in Carter Coal, before collapsing in 1937 with the switch. I find myself wanting to know more about this: did they think that they were going to win–stop the New Deal long enough and that when the dust cleared the 1920s would come back?

This is what led FDR to his “court packing” episode, which would inspire conservatives to never ever ever manipulate the judicial system for any purpose whatsoever. Nevertheless, the impact was real.

Never fear, though: the right wing was on the job! They reformed the committee that had been originally formed to investigate Nazis into the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1938 to help root out all those socialists & communists they felt had commanded the New Deal. And these brave, pre-SURGE! conservatives saved us from the Works Projects Administration ’cause it build big intimidating buildings, and from the Federal Theater Project, which ruined Shakespeare by working with that Communist Christopher Marlowe, but the Committee couldn’t manage to investigate that “old American institution” the Klan, The End.

Again, I quote from that radical Soviet propaganda source, Time magazine, founded by that well-known Bolshevik, Henry Luce:

Un-American Week

Time, Monday, Sep. 05, 1938

The House Committee on Un-American Activities headed by ham-handed Representative Martin Dies of Texas, after hearings in Washington which revealed it as nothing but an ill-planned, amateurish Red-hunt, last week heard some news of fascist propaganda but soon got back to its Red theme.

From the testimony of Joseph B. Matthews, onetime head of the League Against War & Fascism (now League for Peace & Democracy), the Committee learned that “the Communist Party relies heavily upon the carelessness or indifference of thousands of prominent citizens in lending their names for its propaganda purposes. For example, the French newspaper Ce Soir, which is owned outright by the Communist Party, recently featured hearty greetings from Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, James Cagney and even Shirley Temple.”

Soon afterward the Committee, having finished its work in Washington, announced that it would use up what remains of its $25,000 appropriation traveling, and one stop, announced Chairman Dies, would be Hollywood…

…Arriving in Tacoma full of beans after junketing in Alaska, PW Administrator Harold Ickes last week jumped into the intra-Democratic dogfight with an unexpected assault upon tart old Senator Carter Glass of Virginia. “The reactionary press,” said Mr. Ickes, “hails this ‘rugged individual’ as another Horatius-at-the-Bridge because of his bitter attacks on economic policies of the Government. Yet no Senator comes oftener and with more insistence for PWA grants than this same Senator Glass.”

From his home in Lynchburg, back cracked Senator Glass, overflowing with indignation and invective: “Secretary Ickes has become a confirmed blackguard, saturated with hate for every member of Congress who voted against spendthrift practices of the New Deal authorities and against projecting the Government into every conceivable species of business. His statement concerning me is simply a wanton falsehood. I doubt if there is a member of Congress who has had less than I to do with so-called Government grants. . . . Horatius-at-the-Bridge stood and fought; he did not go 3,000 miles across the continent to lie about his adversaries.”…

After that, though, anti-New Deal’ers relied on the Scooby Doo Villain’s Haunted Theme Park approach: they felt they were on the edge of killing the New Deal specifically and in general the idea that the government needed to intervene in the economy in ways that protected and benefited the population.

And they would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for them meddlin’ Nazis who invaded the rest of Europe and the Japs who bombed Pearl Bailey in like some year or something.

Right wing pseudo-scholars make hay, too, with confusing the party identification of Southern Democrats with the notion that they were liberal, which they were not. The Southern Democrats were the ultra-conservatives, with the concomitant requirement that they not complain about socialist Big Government spending when it’s going where they want it, and if’n it’s not helpin’ the colored folk.

I’m going to cry. I just spent an inordinate amount of time composing a brilliant & inspiring post, replete with humor, blockquotes, links and all and then I eated it. The End.

Cap & Gown is right that imposing the new (and conservative-negotiated) program of financing the Social Security system through employer & employee taxes while hewing to a balanced budget approach was seen by FDR’s own economics adviser Lauch Currie quite clearly in his 1938 memo as having that very recessionary effect. Currie recommend therefore what we would now call “deficit spending”.

I’m no expert but if memory serves the tilt towards huge companies dominating American Manufacturing came about as a side effect of World War 2 – You’re not going to order 1,000,000 jeeps from 6 different manufactuers – you’re going to give the order to the biggest firm around – if they spread the order out well – that helps secure their domanice since the other firms are dependent on them but that’s not your look out you as the goverment want those 1,000,000 jeeps asap.

of course this could all be just bad memory early in the morning.

By the way, don’t let all this fixation on the past blur you to the fact that the right wingers are, in fact, going to use the current crisis to push for even more radical anti-regulationism:

In Treasury Plan, a Reluctant Eye Over Wall Street

By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ and FLOYD NORRIS, March 30, 2008, The New York Times

The Bush administration is proposing the broadest overhaul of Wall Street regulation since the Great Depression. But the plan, to be unveiled on Monday, has its genesis in a yearlong effort to limit Washington’s role in the market…

…The regulatory umbrella created in the 1930s would grow wider, with power concentrated in fewer agencies. But that authority would be limited, doing virtually nothing to regulate the many new financial products whose unwise use has been a culprit in the current financial crisis.

The plan hands vast new authority to the Federal Reserve, essentially formalizing what has been an improvised process over the last three weeks. But some fear that the central bank’s role in creating the current mess will undercut its ability to clean it up.

All the checks and balances in the plan reflect the mindset of its architect, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., who came to Washington after a long career on Wall Street. He has worried that any effort to substantially tighten regulation could hamper the ability of American markets to compete with foreign rivals, though he has intervened in the mortgage crisis to try to persuade banks to offer concessions to some troubled borrowers

…“The Fed oversaw this meltdown,” said Michael Greenberger, a law professor at the University of Maryland who was a senior official of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission during the Clinton administration. “This is the equivalent of the builders of the Maginot line giving lessons on defense.”…

Yes, the f***ing a**holes who created our current risk of Great Depression II: The Reaganing intend to follow it up with the SURGE of de-regulation and business self control.

Ha ha, f*** you all, The End.

I will bow to Cap and Gown’s superior knowledge if he then allows that, if Social Security payments did not begin until years later, then, at the time of its inception, it was in no way a successful social justice program, as he earlier suggested.

As El Cid has deftly pointed out, FDR did the best he could with what he had to work with. He was laying a foundation for the future.

Also, it should be noted that by 1938 the President had been persuaded to adopt a Keynsian approach, and at that point Social Security was heavily revised so that it would begin immediately paying out benefits so as to pump money into the economy.

Protected Static @ 1:09 said, “Yes, well… there are theories and there are theories crazy fucked-up-whacked-out ideas…” and provided a link to the relevant Wikipedia article on David Ickes.

So, I follow the link and read that part of David Ickes’ “theory” is that many prominent figures are reptilian, including George W. Bush.

What I want to know is, how is this a “crazy fucked-up-whaced-out” idea?

El Cid – Thank you! Goldsphincter it is! Synonymous with stupid. And now I can’t get the soundtrack to the James Bond flick outta my head…with the new words added.