THIS JUST IN: HEBERT HOOVER WAS A “PROGRESSIVE:” Leftist Thomas Piketty, Another Economist Who Gets Historical Facts Wrong. President Herbert Hoover Raised Top Rate to 63% in 1932 Which Keynesian Economist Gets Wrong Hurting His Argument.
Related: Herbert Hoover Increased Government Spending 67%, Making Him the Founder of the New Deal.
In 1932, FDR didn’t run on scaling up government even further. Instead, as Jesse Walker of Reason wrote in 2008, Roosevelt “accused Herbert Hoover of ‘reckless and extravagant spending,’ and he further denounced the Republican incumbent for believing ‘we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible.’ Even when he called for interventions in the economy, he generally couched his words in the old liberals’ language of equal treatment rather than the new liberals’ vision of enlightened central planning.”
As Walker noted, the Democratic platform of 1932 “is a remarkable document, considering the way the party’s candidate went on to govern. It isn’t a libertarian manifesto—it endorses several subsidies and regulations—but it hardly embraces the enormous expansion in federal power that FDR would achieve.”
Which would prolong the Depression by seven years, UCLA economists calculated a decade ago.