FDR understood that prosperity would be created through growth, not austerity, and today's leaders may finally be learning the same lesson.

To balance our budget in 1933 or 1934 or 1935 would have been a crime against the American people. To do so we should either have had to make a capital levy that would have been confiscatory, or we should have had to set our face against human suffering with callous indifference. When Americans suffered, we refused to pass by on the other side. Humanity came first.

…This debt is not going to be paid by oppressive taxation on future generations. It is not going to be paid by taking away the hard-won savings of the present generation. It is going to be paid out of an increased national income and increased individual incomes produced by increasing national prosperity. — Franklin Roosevelt, 1936

The recent news that the U.K. and other major European economies have officially entered a double dip recession has led many observers to argue, as the New York Times did last week, that the economic policies followed by the Obama administration have been better than the austerity measures pursued by his European counterparts. Indeed, most mainstream economists now agree with the voters in France, who, in electing François Hollande as their next president, have endorsed the idea that “austerity need not be Europe’s fate.”

There is a growing recognition on both sides of the Atlantic that President Obama's approach, which has combined stimulus spending, capital injections, and quantitative easing, is largely responsible for the fragile yet steady recovery the United States has been experiencing since 2010. Granted, the U.S. economy remains weak, and as such there is real concern that the downturn in Europe might drag the U.S. back into recession. But there is another, perhaps greater risk to the U.S. recovery that emanates from our own shores: the incessant demand for European-style federal budget cuts from American austerity hawks.

As evidenced by last summer’s debt ceiling debacle or the draconian budget proposed this spring by Rep. Paul Ryan, the right wing of the Republican party will seemingly stop at nothing to achieve its goal of cutting the size of government. Moreover, its unremitting sky-is-falling rhetoric—which is based largely on fear—has become so pervasive in our political discourse that the question of cutting the federal deficit receives nearly equal footing with the issue of job creation in the media and on the campaign trail. We are told again and again that the way to create jobs is to reduce spending and cut the size of government. Never mind that these policies have failed in Europe over the past two years, while President Obama’s rejection of austerity has resulted in sustained economic growth over exactly the same period.

Roughly three-quarters of a century ago, a similar argument raged between Franklin Roosevelt, who firmly believed that it was right and proper for the government to intervene in the economy during a time of crisis, and those on the extreme right who insisted the way to end the Great Depression was to reduce the federal deficit and balance the budget, no matter what the short-term costs.

FDR had little time for such arguments, which he viewed as not only selfish, but un-American. In his view, most Americans, “if they know both sides of a question and are asked to support the public good, will step forward and lay aside selfishness.” But, he went on:

…we must admit that there are some people who honestly believe in a wholly different theory of government than the one our Constitution provides.

You know their reasoning. They say that in the competition of life for the good things of life “some people are successful because they have better brains or are more efficient; the wise, the swift and the strong are able to outstrip their fellowmen.” And they say that that is nature itself and you cannot do anything about it and it is just too bad if some, the minority of people, get left behind.

For Roosevelt, however—and the vast majority of Americans who voted for him over the course of four terms in office—such an attitude was unacceptable. They understood that there were times in the life of a nation when government had a duty to intervene in the economy, even if it meant going into debt. Thanks to their efforts, and to their faith in government, we continue to enjoy Social Security, unemployment insurance, Federal Deposit Insurance, and a host of other beneficial programs that came from the New Deal.

Conservative commentators today are fond of arguing that the New Deal did not work, that it was the war, rather than New Deal spending, which finally got the United States out of the Great Depression. What they fail to mention, of course, is that New Deal spending did work, just not enough to pull us out of the deep trough we were in. For that we needed much more spending, the kind of spending—and borrowing—that occurred in World War II. According to the logic of today’s budget hawks, such a massive level of deficit and debt should have brought the U.S. economy to a screeching halt once the war was over. But that did not happen. On the contrary, the period of economic growth that occurred in the United States after the war was the largest and longest the world had ever seen.

Much like the 1930s, our slow climb out of the Great Recession has been made all the more difficult and painful thanks in large part to the unwillingness of austerity hawks in Congress to pass the president’s ill-fated jobs bill and other pieces of stimulus legislation. Sadly, they seem far more interested in promoting the myth of austerity and the evils of short-term deficit spending than they do in confronting the overwhelming evidence from Europe and our own history that now is the time not to cut the federal budget, but to expand it.

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.

Here's a datapoint I was surprised to learn. From a footnote by Bob Greenstein of CBPP, there's a paper titled Income Mobility and the Earned Income Tax Credit: Short-Term Safety Net or Long-Term Income Support, by Tim Dowd and John B. Horowitz.

Is the safety net a hammock?  And is the system fundamentally broken if some 40 percent of American don't pay an income tax? This is the brunt of the conservative attack on the welfare state.  As Paul Ryan notes, his plan will make sure the government doesn't "turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives." Ryan's plan is focused on cutting spending through the tax code.  Most tax code spending benefits the top 20 percent of Americans, with one exception - the set of refundable credits including the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).  Those mostly go to those in the bottom 40 percent of Americans.  If you have the concerns mentioned above, the EITC is the place you'd cut.

But does the EITC represent a "hammock," a permanent class of the poor living lives of "depenency and complacency"?  For one, EITC is connected to those who work, so one would think that it would be excluded from the assault on the welfare state.  But beyond that, it appears that those claiming EITC are people going in and out of working poverty with a surprising turnover frequency.  From the Dowd/Horowitz paper (my bold):

Sixty-one percent have spells of one or 2 years. However, at the same time, we find that 20 percent of EITC recipients starting a spell, conditional on observing the taxpayer in 1989, claim the credit 5 or more years. Therefore, for some taxpayers, the EITC acts as a temporary safety net during periods of either anticipated or unanticipated income or family structure shocks. But the EITC also acts as a long-term mechanism of providing assistance to taxpayers with children who are entrenched in the lowest- income brackets.

Indivar Dutta-Gupta at CBPP has more on the study, also noting that (my bold):

The EITC goes to working people — the overwhelming majority of them families with children — with incomes up to roughly $49,000.  Earlier unpublished research from Dowd and Horowitz found that EITC users pay much more in federal income taxes over time than they receive in EITC benefits.  Taxpayers who claimed the EITC at least once during the 18-year period from 1989 through 2006 paid several hundred billion dollars in net federal income tax over this period, after subtracting the EITC and any other refunds.

Dowd and Horowitz’s new study also found that EITC use is highest when children are youngest — which is also when parents’ wages are lowest.  (Working parents’ wages rise, on average, as their children grow up.)  This finding is particularly important given the importance of income for young children’s learning and the evidence that poverty in early childhood may reduce children’s earnings as adults.

Rather than a permanent class of non-taxpayers, EITC users do, in fact, pay more in federal taxes over time than they get in EITC benefits, which represents how many of them move in and out of working poverty over the course of several years.  The study finds that mobility is lower on the whole for this group, which makes a safety net even more of a necessary thing.  But perhaps we can cut with the hammock language, and focus on the metaphor of a trampoline, providing people much needed support when there's a sudden shock to the economy or their lives that drops their ability to provide for themselves, and also a mechanism that promotes the kind of risk-taking we want in our society.  The question is how to make that stronger.

This week, Roosevelt Institute Fellow Dorian Warren joined a panel on America's growing inequality crisis hosted by The Century Foundation and featuring TCF's Greg Anrig, Daniel Alpert, and Robert Hockett along with Timothy Noah, author of The Great Divergence. In the video below, Dorian lays out three points that need to be included in any discussion of what's causing inequality and how we can address it: lawless employers, race-based political polarization, and the rise of an American oligarchy.

On the first point, Dorian notes the recent Wal Mart bribery scandal and says that when you think of "the lawlessness of Wal Mart when it comes to unionization, I think that's a great example to think about the other ways in which employers have pretty flagrantly violated the law in the last 20 years or so. So when you think about minimum wage, when you think about health and safety, we're in a new environment, and activists who work on this call this 'wage theft.'" He highlights some shocking statistics from a 2009 study that shows how badly low-income workers have been ripped off by their employers and points out that there is a "basic principle of the social contract that when you work at a job you have an agreement with the employer for how much you're going to make... There is a pretty systematic violation of that contract, and that explains at least part of the wage stagnation that we've seen in the low-wage service sector specifically." While updating and modernizing labor laws is important, "monitoring and enforcement of existing wage and hour laws are really important."

Where race is concerned, Dorian argues that while it doesn't explain the rise of inequality by itself, "there is a story where race does play a role, and it's a political story." He points out that "for 80 percent of our country's history, the majority of Americans weren't classified as citizens," and that Lyndon Johnson's signing of the Civli Rights Act caused an exodus of white southerners from the Democratic Party to the GOP. He says that "there is a difference between Republican administrations and Democratic administrations, but how you get to a Republic administration has to be part of that story, and that's very much about race and the response of southern whites to greater inclusion into American democracy." This racial backlash in turn helps to shape the policies that further inequality.

Finally, Dorian says that it's difficult to find solutions to the problem of inequality, as even the best policy solutions may not be politically viable. Citing political scientist Jeffrey Winters, he asks, "How do we make sense of the fact that we live in both a democracy and an oligarchy at the same time?" Wealth has become highlighy concentrated in the U.S. while also granting the wealthy a disproportionate level of political influence and a number of methods to safeguard their wealth and prevent redistribution. He notes that "the expectation of democracies is that non-rich people would outnumber rich people and therefore demand through their vote the one thing that makes everybody equal, greater redistribution." He concludes with the toughest question of all: "From the 1960s to the present, when we've expanded our democracy, how is it the case that we've also seen more redistribution but actually less and greater inequality?"