Random thought on Rethug revisionist history of the Great Depression.

[backscatter712]

OK, if we take the version of the Great Depression currently being shilled by Mitch McConnell and company, let's look through it a bit.

FDR and the Democrats came up with the New Deal, engaged in Government Spending (TM) to build dams, roads, various types of infrastructure and get people working.

But Government Spending doesn't work!!! They languished in the Great Depression until the end of the '30s. (Let's ignore those inconvenient graphs of employment rates and GDP and such that disprove this.)

See, what really got us out of the Great Depression was World War II. See, the whole nation got together, sent soldiers and such overseas, and we built a whole bunch of guns, bullets, bombs, airplanes, tanks, ships, food, supplies, etc. etc. etc. so we could blow our enemies to tiny bits more efficiently.

How did we pay for all those soldiers and weapons and supplies and such so we could blow Bad Guys to smithereens?

Oh yeah, GOVERNMENT SPENDING!

But I thought government spending didn't work...

[Wetzelbill]

1. WW2 was a giant public works project

Repubs just can't grasp the simplest of things that doesn't fit into their ideology. It just doesn't register. You could show them that every Dem president has had better job and economic growth than every Repub president and it won't register. They can look at official stats like that and nothing. They know what they know and they know it works because they just believe it does and that's that. Nothing else, fact or not, even makes a difference.

[backscatter712]

2. Yep. They're impervious to logic and reason.

Anything that contradicts their Kool-Aid-drinking pre-programmed ideology is discarded as bad data - they end up living in a totally different reality. Kind of schizophrenic when you think about it.

[provis99]

3. it might be even worse

I think they are anti-logic; they exist in a world where economic collapse is good, because it signals the "End Times" when all good Republicans will be raptured up to Republicanland in the Sky.

[Wetzelbill]

6. seriously

I don't even like to think about stuff like that. It effing creeps me out. I hope it's not that bad. I know this, some of them think like that, I hope those are people stuck in the deep recesses of their base though and not in office. Notice I said hope, because I am not too confident about it.

[Wetzelbill]

4. I heard Paul Krugman say that once

That facts don't matter to them. To me that seemed ridiculous, then I started noticing on youtube and other places that you could factually show a Republican they are wrong about something and it doesn't register. Link to an official site or whatever, they do not care.

Then I checked out some of John Dean's book about conservatives, and the book the concept was based on and it all started coming together. "The Authoritarians" by Bob Altemeyer. It's enlightening. And available for free online.

http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

[backscatter712]

5. The Authoritarians is a very good book.

It should be required reading here.

[Wetzelbill]

7. even glancing at it for a few minutes is illuminating.

Right off you find stuff that puts the GOP mindset into perspective.

[Jawja]

8. Repukes are NOT opposed to

big government spending if it involves weapons and weapons manufacturers. They are only opposed to big government spending when it involves healthcare, education, and all of those pesky little projects that support Americans.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

9. K&R. One simple graph rebuts the Republican revisionists very well, IMO

A great graph of unemployment and output in the 30s is at one of my favorite economic blogs, U of Oregon econ prof Mark Thoma's: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2008/11/stop-lying-abou.html . A followup blog entry on data sources by a colleague of Thoma's is at http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/11/unemployment-du.html

Roosevelt's massive WPA spending brought the unemployment rate down 10 percentage points by 1937. When he took his foot off the accelerator in 1937 to appease Republican deficit concerns, unemployment rose sharply. IMO, this is the best kind of rough time-series evidence about the effect of A (government spending) on B (unemployment). Raise A and B goes down. Then lower A and B goes up. I haven't read Amity Shlaes, but I doubt she marshals available evidence this convincingly.