If we?re not traveling on the road toward New France, we at least seem to be headed back to the bad old days of the New Deal.
As Hillsdale College history professor Burton Folsom reminds us in the college?s latest volume of Imprimis:
[T]he taxes to pay for the New Deal became astronomical. In 1935, Roosevelt decided to raise the marginal tax rate on top incomes to 79 percent. Later he raised it to 90 percent. These confiscatory rates discouraged entrepreneurs from investing, which prolonged the Great Depression.
Henry Morgenthau, FDR’s loyal Secretary of the Treasury, was frustrated at the persistence of double-digit unemployment throughout the 1930s. In May 1939, with unemployment at 20 percent, he exploded at the failed New Deal programs. “We have tried spending money,” Morgenthau noted. “We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. . . . We have never made good on our promises. . . . I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . . And an enormous debt to boot!”
For more on the New Deal?s failures, check out Amity Shlaes? work.
