Reform, the FDR way
WHERE'S the fun? That's the feeling you get watching the Democrats in Washington this summer. Gone is the happy plan for a frenzy of lawmaking, the "Hundred Hours" of action Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised when the Democrats took the House. The speaker's artful allusion to Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Hundred Days" quickly became an ironic echo. During that first euphoric legislative period, Roosevelt managed to rescue the banking system from disaster, assist bankrupted farmers, rewrite the economics of agriculture and the rules for flailing businesses, bring back beer -- you name it. Contemporary leaders can't even act on pressing issues such as agriculture and immigration, not to mention Social Security.
Why can't politicians be Roosevelts today? For an answer, let's look to the middle of 1935, about two years into FDR's New Deal and the equivalent of about now in the election cycle. The federal government was still smaller than the nation's state and local governments combined. Two out of 10 men were unemployed. FDR took the economic emergency as a powerful mandate for further lawmaking. He jumped into the project with all the glee of a boy leaping into a sandbox. The papers reported that he was going to "blast out of committee" yet another round of bills, and blast he did -- that year the country's premier labor law, the Wagner Act, was passed, as was Social Security.
At about the same time, Roosevelt slapped together the Rural Electrification Administration, which came on top of the New Deal's large farm subsidies. For construction workers, artists and writers, he created -- also in mid-1935 -- the Works Progress Administration, which hired the unemployed, including artists, craftsmen and journalists. To appreciate the size of that gift, imagine a contemporary politician responding to a market crash by putting ex-employees of Google on the federal payroll. The president also built on to an already large structure, the Public Works Administration, which funded town halls, grammar schools and swimming pools in 3,000 counties. The money? Roosevelt passed a tax increase that opponents called the "soak the rich" act. It contained an estate tax rate hike that would make John Edwards drool. By 1936, the government took up more than 9% of gross domestic product. For the first peacetime year in U.S. history, Washington had edged past the state and local governments in size to become a larger part of the national economy. (Just a few years earlier, state and local governments had been twice as large as Washington.) FDR had reversed the old crucial ratio of federalism, and Washington has dominated the country ever since.
