The debate rages in academia and on the pages of the nation's newspapers; how successful was FDR's New Deal in bringing the economy back from its lows in 1932-34?Amity Shales of the Wall Street Journal and author of a recent book on the New Deal shows conclusively that government spending on make-work jobs programs did absolutely nothing to bring the underlying unemployment rate down significantly and may have even delayed recovery:Ms. Shales takes Nobel Prize winning economist and New York Times hysteric Paul Krugman to task for risking another depression by advocating a massive public sector jobs program:What kept the picture so dark so long? Deflation for one, but also the notion that government could engineer economic recovery by favoring the public sector at the expense of the private sector. New Dealers raised taxes again and again to fund spending. The New Dealers also insisted on higher wages when businesses could ill afford them. Roosevelt, for example, signed into law...(Read Full Post)