NY Times, November 10, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Franklin Delano Obama?
By Paul Krugman
Suddenly, everything old is New Deal again. Reagan is out; F.D.R. is in.
Still, how much guidance does the Roosevelt era really offer for today’s
world?
The answer is, a lot. But Barack Obama should learn from F.D.R.’s
failures as well as from his achievements: the truth is that the New
Deal wasn’t as successful in the short run as it was in the long run.
And the reason for F.D.R.’s limited short-run success, which almost
undid his whole program, was the fact that his economic policies were
too cautious.
About the New Deal’s long-run achievements: the institutions F.D.R.
built have proved both durable and essential. Indeed, those institutions
remain the bedrock of our nation’s economic stability. Imagine how much
worse the financial crisis would be if the New Deal hadn’t insured most
bank deposits. Imagine how insecure older Americans would feel right now
if Republicans had managed to dismantle Social Security.
Can Mr. Obama achieve something comparable? Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama’s
new chief of staff, has declared that “you don’t ever want a crisis to
go to waste.” Progressives hope that the Obama administration, like the
New Deal, will respond to the current economic and financial crisis by
creating institutions, especially a universal health care system, that
will change the shape of American society for generations to come.
But the new administration should try not to emulate a less successful
aspect of the New Deal: its inadequate response to the Great Depression
itself.
Now, there’s a whole intellectual industry, mainly operating out of
right-wing think tanks, devoted to propagating the idea that F.D.R.
actually made the Depression worse. So it’s important to know that most
of what you hear along those lines is based on deliberate
misrepresentation of the facts. The New Deal brought real relief to most
Americans.
That said, F.D.R. did not, in fact, manage to engineer a full economic
recovery during his first two terms. This failure is often cited as
evidence against Keynesian economics, which says that increased public
spending can get a stalled economy moving. But the definitive study of
fiscal policy in the ’30s, by the M.I.T. economist E. Cary Brown,
reached a very different conclusion: fiscal stimulus was unsuccessful
“not because it does not work, but because it was not tried.”
This may seem hard to believe. The New Deal famously placed millions of
Americans on the public payroll via the Works Progress Administration
and the Civilian Conservation Corps. To this day we drive on
W.P.A.-built roads and send our children to W.P.A.-built schools. Didn’t
all these public works amount to a major fiscal stimulus?
Well, it wasn’t as major as you might think. The effects of federal
public works spending were largely offset by other factors, notably a
large tax increase, enacted by Herbert Hoover, whose full effects
weren’t felt until his successor took office. Also, expansionary policy
at the federal level was undercut by spending cuts and tax increases at
the state and local level.
And F.D.R. wasn’t just reluctant to pursue an all-out fiscal expansion —
he was eager to return to conservative budget principles. That eagerness
almost destroyed his legacy. After winning a smashing election victory
in 1936, the Roosevelt administration cut spending and raised taxes,
precipitating an economic relapse that drove the unemployment rate back
into double digits and led to a major defeat in the 1938 midterm elections.
What saved the economy, and the New Deal, was the enormous public works
project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus
adequate to the economy’s needs.
This history offers important lessons for the incoming administration.
The political lesson is that economic missteps can quickly undermine an
electoral mandate. Democrats won big last week — but they won even
bigger in 1936, only to see their gains evaporate after the recession of
1937-38. Americans don’t expect instant economic results from the
incoming administration, but they do expect results, and Democrats’
euphoria will be short-lived if they don’t deliver an economic recovery.
The economic lesson is the importance of doing enough. F.D.R. thought he
was being prudent by reining in his spending plans; in reality, he was
taking big risks with the economy and with his legacy. My advice to the
Obama people is to figure out how much help they think the economy
needs, then add 50 percent. It’s much better, in a depressed economy, to
err on the side of too much stimulus than on the side of too little.
In short, Mr. Obama’s chances of leading a new New Deal depend largely
on whether his short-run economic plans are sufficiently bold.
Progressives can only hope that he has the necessary audacity.
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