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Bartlett: New Deal Failed Because It Wasn’t Big Enough
Matthew Yglesias — Bruce Bartlett has a very nice column on the real lessons of the New Deal: One reason why Republicans strenuously oppose the Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus plan is because it repeats the errors of Franklin D. Roosevelt. To them, the New Deal was mainly about vastly expanding government spending and deficits, which Republicans believe made the Great Depression worse rather than better. Therefore, doing so again in the present downturn will also lead to failure. The true New Deal legacy, however, is more complicated. Serious ...

Bruce Bartlett: The Real Lesson Of The New Deal: Deficits were too small, not too large...
J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with All Eight Tentacles — Bruce Bartlett: The Real Lesson Of The New Deal: Deficits were too small, not too large...

The Right And The Stimulus
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan — ... The biggest error, I think, was in declaring that the principle of fiscal loosening in the jaws of a brutal downdraft in demand was flawed. It isn't, for the reasons Bruce Bartlett and even ...

Bruce Bartlett Struggles in Vain Against Stupidity
Matthew Yglesias — ... Bruce Bartlett is, I assure you, a bona fide right-winger who believes in low taxes and lax regulation. But he’s not out of touch with reality, which is how he came to write this column arguing that some New Deal policies impeded recovery, but as far as deficit spending goes the problem was that deficits were too small not that he spent too much. ...

When Ideology Trumps Circumstances
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan — ... do I understand the conservative antipathy for Keynes, who was in fact deeply conservative. He developed his theories primarily for the purpose of saving capitalism from some form of socialism. Same goes for Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose biggest economic mistake, I believe, was not that he ran big budget deficits, as all conservatives believe, but that he didn't run deficits nearly large enough until the war forced his hand. (I discuss these points in columns here and here.) Read the whole thing. ...