We have had more than seven decades of experience with entitlement programs, since Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced the first big one in 1935. Now Barack Obama is pushing another big entitlement program — ...
FDR established the Securities & Exchange Commission to protect people in securities markets. Yet there already were plenty of laws against theft and fraud, crimes that are seldom exposed by government regulators.
Consider the ...
FDR didn’t know what to do about the Great Depression he inherited from Herbert Hoover, so he tried everything. He hiked taxes, spent more money, established monopolies, enforced cartels, filed antitrust lawsuits, promoted ...
If Social Security is so wonderful, why were people forced to participate, why was it set up as a monopoly, and why did it dump ever-larger costs onto the backs of future generations?
There ...
For decades, labor unions struggled for power, but until the 1930s they had made little headway.
Unions were based on force and violence, which repelled a substantial number of employees as well as ...
In 1938, after having spent many New Deal years signing laws that banned discounting and established cartels, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt denounced “the concentration of economic control” that many of his laws promoted. ...
The New Deal was paid for mainly by the middle class and the poor. This was because excise taxes were the biggest revenue generators for the federal government. They applied to beer, liquor, ...
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Americans desperately needed bargains. But President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed laws that forced businesses to charge above-market prices for everything. He made discounting a crime! ...
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a reputation as a friend of black people, yet he signed laws that promoted racial segregation throughout the United States. The laws were supposed to promote “affordable housing.”
Until ...
FDR won the 1936 presidential election with more than 27 million votes, compared to 16 million for his Republican opponent Alf Landon. FDR won the Electoral College vote by an even bigger margin — ...
