The Fake History of the Depression
posted by Mises Daily / Robert P. Murphy
Hat tip: LewRockwell.com
Since late 2007, more and more commentators have drawn parallels between our current financial crisis and the Great Depression. Nobel laureates and presidential advisors confidently proclaim that it was Herbert Hoover’s laissez-faire penny pinching that exacerbated the Depression, and that the American economy was saved only when FDR boldly ran up enormous deficits to fight the Nazis. But as I document in my new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal, this official history is utterly false.
Let’s first set the record straight on Herbert Hoover’s fiscal policies. Contrary to what you have heard and read over the last year, Hoover behaved as a textbook Keynesian after the stock-market crash. He immediately cut income tax rates by one percentage point (applicable to the 1929 tax year) and began ratcheting up federal spending, increasing it 42 percent from fiscal year (FY) 1930 to FY 1932.
But to truly appreciate Hoover’s Keynesian bona fides, we must realize that this enormous jump in spending occurred amidst a collapse in tax receipts, due both to the decline in economic activity as well as the price deflation of the early 1930s. This combination led to unprecedented peacetime deficits under the Hoover administration — something FDR railed against during the 1932 campaign!
How big were Hoover’s deficits? Well, his predecessor Calvin Coolidge had run a budget surplus every single year of his own presidency, and he held the federal budget roughly constant despite the roaring prosperity (and surging tax receipts) of the 1920s. In contrast to Coolidge — who was a true small-government president — Herbert Hoover managed to turn his initial $700 million surplus into a $2.6 billion deficit by 1932.
It’s true, that doesn’t sound like a big number today; Henry Paulson handed out more to bankers by breakfast.
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