If you studied this period of time as I also have, you’ll know why the US was in recession in the first place and why it entered into economic difficulties later on as the New Deal policies steadily got dismantled.
Generally speaking trickle down, deregulated economics is to thank for the market crashes the West has had since 1929.
We weren’t talking about the 1920s boom and bust, were we?
You said the New Deal created the prosperity of the USA which is simply not true - there was a massive recession in the middle of his tenure and frankly, had war broke out in 1941 rather than 1939, the New Deal experiment could’ve been buried. As it happened, 1939 is when war broke out and the USA was propping up democracy (and the USSR from 1941/42) with its war production and profited massively. I admire FDR and is a candidate to be one of the most successful presidents ever. I take issue because you specifically used this example to justify the claim and you left out the fact there was a massive recession named the
‘Roovesevelt Recession’ one year after he won a second term.
Keynesian economics has its place, of course. Even Keynes himself argued for deficit spending
and tax cuts during a recession only. The UK and US practiced Keynesian economics until the 1970s until Thatcher and Reagan came along because the economies experienced both high inflation and economic stagnation - hence the phrases ‘stagflation’.
In that era, developed economies did not have an enlarged welfare state and an aging population - the contexts are very different.
