Why Would Anyone Imitate FDR?

Why indeed!
Why Would Anyone Imitate FDR?

by BURT on MAY 1, 2012

To many observers, the presidency of FDR was a disaster. He had double-digit unemployment throughout the 1930s, and he doubled the size of the national debt in his first two terms. The League of Nations rated the U.S. recovery as one of the worst in the world. Economic stagnation was a cloud over the entire FDR presidency during the 1930s.

Why imitate him? But two presidents in the last forty years have done that–Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. When unemployment soared in the 1970s, President Carter looked to FDR for inspiration. He promoted the Humphrey-Hawkins bill–a modified WPA–to put government in the job-creating business. When OPEC jacked up the price of oil, Carter followed FDR’s approach during World War II: put price controls on oil and slap an excess-profits tax on U.S. oil companies. As a result, oil output in the U.S. dropped, imports increased, and the price of oil tended to remain high. What a disaster! Inflation hit 14%, unemployment 7%, and mortgage interest rates 21.5%.

Ronald Reagan defeated President Carter in 1980 in large part because Reagan argued that freedom, not more government, was the way out of our economic mess.