The Real Deal: FDR vs. BHO Spending Programs

The Museum of American Finance, N.Y.C. - "Checks & Balance" (Exhibit on display through November 2012)

This review, by Mark Yost, a Chicago writer appearing in the Wall Street Journal today, is about a current New York City exhibit which illustrates FDR history as it happened, not as rewritten by Liberal Progressives:

1930 FDR Depression Era Bread Line"President Roosevelt had the unfettered federal hand that many would like to see Barack Obama have today. But as the exhibit makes clear, Roosevelt's massive federal spending and panoply, or dazzling display, of make-work programs during the Depression did little to improve the economy; only World War II turned things around. Unemployment was 25% in 1932 and still at 19% in 1938. It fell to 10% in 1941 because of jobs created for the  Lend-Lease Program,[1] declined further after the U.S. sent troops into battle, and by the war's end stood at 2%."

"And while Roosevelt is often praised as a champion of the working class, in 1942 he lowered the threshold for exemption from federal income tax to $500 from $750 and added a victory tax for annual incomes above $624 a year. The average American income was about $1,200; a teacher made about $1,400." 

Roosevelt's highly advertised "progressive tax" rates really hit the middle class in their pocketbooks by FDR lowering the tax exemption to get more taxes and adding a WW2 Victory Tax on top of the middle class taxpayers too. You never hear about this story ever from the liberals of today about "FDR's unfair income tax" programs. Isn't it about time for Obama to lower the income tax exemptions like Roosevelt did then to distribute the costs of government more fairly over the middle class in order for them to start paying taxes for what people demand collectively? The Obama myth of the "rich should pay their fair share in taxes" has no truth because they already do. As young middle class people will learn, everything that big government promises has a price that they will pay, not the so-called rich. Class warfare is nothing but a Socialist tool under big government rule. 

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[1] The Lend-Lease was the program under which the United States of America supplied the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, China, Free France, and other Allied nations with materiel between 1941 and 1945. It was signed into law on March 11, 1941, a year and a half after the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939 but nine months before the U.S. entered the war in December 1941. Formally titled An Act to Further Promote the Defense of the United States, the Act effectively ended the United States' pretense of neutrality.