Despite a projected $1 trillion deficit next year, President-elect Barack Obama has requested that Congress send him a $1 trillion stimulus bill by Jan. 20, so that he can immediately launch the New Deal II, putting people to work building infrastructure, roads, bridges, schools, transportation systems, green technologies, etc. In this, he seems to betray a belief in a pernicious myth, which holds that President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal ended the Great Depression. It did not. It deepened it and prolonged it.

Adjusted for inflation, the Dow Jones industrial average did not return to 1929 levels until 1955 — an entire generation lost. Due to FDR’s doubling-down on President Herbert Hoover’s economic blunders, the United States descended from a recession to a depression that lasted for over a decade — a depression where there was real hunger in the United States, where suicide rates rose dramatically and life expectancy dropped. More »