The National Hustle

One of my favorite New Deal programs (after you have taken a 400 level class named “America in the Great Depression, you are entitled to have a favorite) has always been the Civilian Conservation Corps or CCC. Something about serving this great nation while helping build trails in national parks, planting over 5 billion trees, or improving our national power grid made me want to strap on some hiking boots, don a flannel shirt, grab some heavy tools and help rebuild America from the ground up. Lack of hand sanitizer, fear of blisters, and uncertain exposure to new episodes of Lost inevitably lead to disavowing myself from such romantic inclinations, but for over 3 million hearty souls during the Great Depression, the CCC provided rewarding work, three square meals, and a stipend of $30 per month.

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In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in the midst of the worst economic crisis since… (Oh wait, it was the Great Depression). Roosevelt moved quickly to establish a set of programs that he and his advisers deemed necessary to aid economic recovery of a struggling nation. Collectively, these programs became known as the “New Deal,” and gradually began to make inroads into the monetary crisis facing our nation at that time.

Today, we face a similarly dire economic climate, so what better time to examine the effectiveness of the “New Deal” programs, and see if some tenets of them might prove effective in the bleak fiscal circumstances we find today.  Just so you are not disappointed with the truncated length of this entry, this will be part one in a mind-numbingly boring multi-segment study (Don’t worry I will get back to mocking things soon). Continue reading