FDR chose action to combat flooding and soil erosion that did much more than conserve land.

The massive flooding that struck the Midwest in recent days has led a number of climatologists to argue that this event -- along with the occurrence of similar floods in Australia, Pakistan and elsewhere -- is further indication of the impact of the increase in greenhouse gasses in the earth's atmosphere. The warmer air associated with the increase holds more moisture, and the greater the moisture content, the greater the level of precipitation. Hence the record snowfalls for the upper Midwest this season and the extraordinary amounts of rain that much of the region received in April (Paducah Kentucky, for example, received 22 inches of rain in April, as compared to the average 5.4 inches it usually receives).

For the vast majority of scientists -- and for an increasing number of individuals and institutions in other parts of the world -- the potential impact of climate change is being viewed with growing alarm. But in Washington, just the opposite is true. The US House of Representatives recently rejected an amendment that would have put the House on record as acknowledging that global warming is occurring and that human activity is the major cause. In this milieu, and in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, there is almost no chance that we will see any significant climate legislation emerge from the current Congress.

Interestingly, 75 years ago the United States faced a very similar natural disaster in the form of the Great Flood of 1936. Unlike today, however, the death and destruction that struck much of the eastern United States as a result of the flood spurred Congress into action. It passed of one of the most significant -- though lesser-known -- pieces of legislation to come out of the New Deal: the Flood Control Act of 1936.

Recognizing for the first time "that destructive floods upon the rivers of the United States constitute a menace to national welfare" and that "flood control on navigable waters or their tributaries is a proper activity of the Federal Government in cooperation with States," the Roosevelt administration worked with members of Congress to pass the first piece of legislation to provide for national flood relief. The hundreds of reservoir, levee, and channelization projects that resulted from the 1936 act protected millions of acres of farmland, saved countless lives, and literally changed the face of the nation. Taken together, the projects that came about as a consequence of the act constitute one of the largest additions to our nation's economic infrastructure, on par with the development of the nation's highway system. Moreover, in keeping with the spirit of the New Deal, the construction of many of these flood control projects (which usually took place under the auspices of the US Army Corps of Engineers) also spurred local and regional economic growth and helped conserve one of our nation's most precious resources -- our soil.

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It was perhaps soil erosion, in fact, more than any other issue that drove President Roosevelt to support the passage of the flood control act. Having seen the dire consequences of the Dust Bowl, and as a great lover and believer in the restorative power of the land, FDR was deeply concerned about the long-term productivity of American topsoil. To combat erosion, he not only passed the Flood Control Act of 1936, but also established the Soil Conservation Service, which encouraged farmers to adopt more environmentally friendly practices; the Civilian Conservation Corps, which helped restore our nation's forests; and the Tennessee Valley Authority, which not only helped control erosion in the Tennessee River Valley, but also provided inexpensive hydroelectric power to an entire region of the country.

Most importantly, all of these programs helped create jobs and spur economic activity. And while today many environmentalists might take issue with certain aspects of the flood control work that came about as a consequence of the act (such as the channelization of rivers and streams), few would take issue with the spirit of conservation that inspired it.

The Flood Control Act of 1936 is but one example of the remarkable record of legislative achievements that came about in the 74th Congress. In response to the needs of a people in the midst of both environmental and economic crisis, members of Congress worked with the Roosevelt administration to pass not only this landmark piece of legislation, but also the Social Security Act, National Labor Relations Act, Banking Act of 1935, Soil Conservation Act, and the $4.8 billion Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, out of which came the WPA, among other programs.

It is perhaps the best testament to our current era that this Congress, facing a remarkably similar set of circumstances, has chosen not "action and action now," as FDR would put it, but rather to do nothing.

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute.

FDR knew that even when an idea failed, he had to keep trying.  Republicans think that if they keep trying the same thing, they can't fail.

It would be difficult to imagine a better illustration of the stark difference between the political and ideological aftermaths of the economic collapses of 1929 and 2008 than the statement made on Thursday, the eve of the anniversary of the inauguration of the WPA in 1935, by House Speak John Boehner.

“Nothing is off the table except raising taxes,” Mr. Boehner declared when addressing negotiations on raising the debt ceiling. “I believe that raising taxes will hurt our economy and hurt job creation in our country.”

What we are seeing yet again is a clash between faith-based economics and fact-based economics.

Mr. Boehner and most of his fellow Republicans are people of faith. Their faith, though, is not in God, but in the Market. Their devil is the government. They know the Truth, and facts and evidence will not shake their faith.

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The same difference between policy based on faith and on facts was the greatest one between Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt. The former was an ideologue, the latter a pragmatist. In 1932, FDR exemplified the fact-based approach when he famously called for “bold, persistent experimentation” and said, “It is common sense to take a method and try it; if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” For his part, Mr. Hoover, like most people in his party today, was oblivious to evidence. His position (and, far more, that of today’s full-blown believers in the Market God) was: Take the Method (as they see it, there is only one) and try it. If it fails, deny its failure and try it again -- and again . . . and again . . . . But, above all, keep trying the same thing.

Low taxes on the rich, little government regulation, and concentration of wealth and income at the very top led to the Great Depression. When they were reinstated during the administration of George W. Bush, those policies produced the Great Recession. In between, when President Bill Clinton proposed a modest increase in the top marginal tax rate as part of his 1993 budget proposal, “conservative” economists predicted disaster and, basing their positions on received dogma, every Republican in Congress voted against the Clinton budget plan. It was followed by a period of sustained prosperity and a budget surplus.

Those facts make no impression on ideologues of the right. Nor does the fact that such government programs as the WPA substantially mitigated the ill effects of the Depression for millions of its victims and that similar programs would do the same today.

The difference boils down to this: Bold, persistent experimentation versus bold persistence.

Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts & Letters and Professor of History at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi and the author of ten books, including The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941.

A universal Jobs Guarantee Program could free us from the predations of politicians and foster a strong economy.

On the anniversary of the inauguration of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), it is striking to compare the unemployment record of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and that of his modern day successor, Barack Obama. FDR's achievements in putting Americans back to work are among the most impressive of his tenure; he took the rate from 25% to 9.6% by 1936. But so far, Obama's policies have failed to "jump-start" unemployment in a significant way, even as Wall Street has continued a recovery utterly and totally divorced from Main Street.

It's easy to see why: The debt loads remain too high while income and employment continue to fall. Meanwhile, delinquencies and foreclosures continue to rise. Even at current depressed prices, assets are overvalued. Many financial institutions (probably including most of the big ones) are hopelessly insolvent, holding mountains of toxic waste that will never be worth anything. By the same token, almost 14 million active job seekers remain unemployed. Another 6.4 million people who are not actively looking for work (and therefore are not counted as unemployed) say they want jobs. Among workers who are lucky enough to have jobs, 8.3 million are employed part-time but want full-time jobs. Taken together, there are well over 28 million people in the United States for whom the economy has not performed its most important function -- providing enough jobs to go around.

The pace of recovery from the recession has been distressingly slow. It took only 18 months for the nation's unemployment rate to climb from 5.0 percent to its peak of 10.1 percent in October 2009. In the 16 months since then, the rate has made up less than a quarter of that loss. True, we did dodge another Great Depression. That fact is attributable to the federal government's forceful macroeconomic intervention in late 2008 and early 2009. Economists Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi (one a former Clinton appointee to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and the other a former economic adviser to Senator John McCain) have estimated that the nation's unemployment rate would have reached 16 percent rather than its actual 10.1 percent in the absence of this intervention.

And yet, in spite of the historic successes of programs such as the WPA, the current government cannot seem to even begin to replicate it. The very fiscal stimulus that helped to avert an even greater economic calamity is now viewed as an excuse against further action to mitigate the scourge of unemployment. We continue to be plagued by misguided notions that our government faces imminent insolvency (imagine the fate of the US had the Roosevelt Administration embraced this idea!).

Part of the aversion toward embracing WPA-style programs today is the false idea that they did little to reduce unemployment, which some claim was only "solved" by the war. Most statistical studies understate the effect of the New Deal job creation measures because they don't show how much of the decline in official employment was attributable to the multiplier effect of spending on direct job creation. Additionally, the "work relief" category does not include employment on public works funded by the Public Works Administration (PWA), nor the multiplier effect of PWA spending. The figures tell the story indirectly, however, in the path official unemployment followed -- steeply declining in periods when work relief spending was high and either declining more slowly or increasing in periods when work relief spending was cut back*.

Estimates for the years prior to 1940 are intended to measure the number of persons who are totally unemployed, having no work at all. For the 1930s this concept, however, does include one large group of persons who had both work and income from work -- those on emergency work. In the United States we are concerned with measuring lack of regular work and do not minimize the total by excluding persons with made work or emergency jobs. This contrasts sharply, for example, with the German practice during the 1930s when persons in the labor-force camps were classed as employed, and Soviet practice which includes employment in labor camps, if it includes it at all, as employment. Counting the WPA programs, FDR's record on unemployment, notably in his first time of office, was formidable, as he took the rate down from 25% to 9.6% by 1936.

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True, an economy can boom for a time, with what may appear to be inadequate levels of net government spending without rising unemployment. In these situations, as is evidenced in countries like the US during the Clinton Administration, GDP growth can be driven by an expansion in private debt. The problem with this strategy is that when the debt service levels reach some threshold percentage of income, the private sector will "run out of borrowing capacity" as incomes limit debt service. This tends to restructure their balance sheets to make them less precarious and as a consequence the aggregate demand from debt expansion slows and the economy falters. In this case, any fiscal drag (inadequate levels of net spending) begins to manifest as unemployment.

The Obama Administration remains fixated by deficit reduction at the expense of reducing unemployment. This is not helpful to recovery: In addition to inflicting lasting damage on an individual's labor market prospects, unemployment is associated with increased rates of physical and mental illness, alcohol and drug abuse, child and spouse abuse, failed relationships and family dissolution, suicide and attempted suicide, and a host of other personal and social ills. All sectors of the unemployed suffer an increased risk of experiencing these problems, but since unemployment itself is distributed unequally among population groups, with disadvantaged workers bearing more than their fair share of its immediate burdens, so too are they destined to bear more than their fair share of its painful, longer-term consequences.

The existence of our current job shortage also makes it harder for us to dig our way out of the recession. Long term unemployment prevents the housing market from rebounding and the housing industry from recovering. It forces the consumer sector to wait anxiously for customers. It keeps capital goods producers waiting for a plausible customer.

A more effective way to restart the economic process on solid ground is to deal with the underlying cause of the problem: We have a credit-based economy, rather than an incomes-based economy. The whole boom of the 2000s (and more broadly the growth process that emerged at the in the early 1980s) was based on household borrowing and the continuation of negative saving trends (that is, household deficit spending). A good place to start recovery efforts, therefore, would be to change this method of economic growth by fostering more, not fewer WPA-type programs.

In my view, a universal Job Guarantee program would be the best way forward and truest to the spirit of the WPA. The jobs would pay basic wages and benefits with a goal to provide a living wage. The program would take all comers -- anyone ready and willing to work, regardless of education, training, or experience. We could adapt the jobs to the workers. As the late Hyman Minsky put it, we could "take the workers as they are", work them up to their ability, and then enhance their skills through on- the-job-training. Additionally, the guaranteed public service job would be a counter- cyclical influence, automatically increasing government employment and spending as jobs were lost in the private sector, and decreasing government jobs and spending as the private sector expanded. Such a program would remain a permanent feature of our economy, acting as a buffer stock to put a floor under unemployment, while maintaining price stability whereby government offers a fixed wage which does not "outbid" the private sector, but simply creates a stabilizing floor and thereby prevents deflation.

Given the nature of today's "predator state" (to use Jamie Galbraith's felicitous phrase), politicians have a proclivity to reward those who "pay to play".  They tend toward wasteful spending and give goodies to campaign contributors. But we could take this power away from sock puppet politicians through a mechanism that automatically adjusts to insure the private sector can actually realize its desired net nominal savings position. This would help to free the system from political parasites while increasing the freedom of the private sector to achieve its savings goals. What better way to celebrate the anniversary of the WPA's inauguration?

Marshall Auerback is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, and a market analyst and commentator.

*The original source of this finding was Michael R. Darby (1976) "Three-and-a-Half Million U.S. Employees Have Been Mislaid: Or, an Explanation of Unemployment, 1934-1941", Journal of Political Economy, 84(1), 1-16). Darby had studied the writings of Stanley Lebergott (1964) Manpower in Economic Growth: The American Record since 1800, New York, McGraw-Hill. He had constructed early data from the Great Depression. See also Weir, D.R. (1992) "A Century of U.S. Unemployment, 1890-1990: Revised Estimates and Evidence for Stabilization", Research in Economic History, 14, 301-346. The hint that Darby picked up was in the original book by Stanley Lebergott on pages 184-5.

On this day one of the most visionary presidents in US history passed away while in office. Roosevelt historian David Woolner honors his legacy, and the legacy of the millions of Americans who grieved at his passing.

In his inaugural address on the 4th of March, 1933, Franklin Roosevelt -- who passed away 66 years ago today -- chastised the forces of wealth and power who, through their greed and avarice, led the United States into the greatest economic crisis of our history, the Great Depression. "Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership," he said, "they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They only know the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish."

Over the next twelve years FDR would articulate a vision for America that was based on the notion that every American deserved not just political rights, but the right to a measure of social and economic security. It was a theme that he returned to again and again, a theme that led to the banking and financial reforms that gave us the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission and which gave us such landmark pieces of legislation as the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act.

The onset of the Second World War and a conservative backlash against the New Deal in the late 1930s limited FDR's ability to push through further reform legislation during the course of his unprecedented third and forth terms. But his belief in the link between political and economic freedom intensified, and it was during the war that his articulation of his vision for America and the world reached its greatest height. It was in January 1941, for example, that FDR expressed his view that the great sacrifices the democracies were making in their struggle against fascism were necessary so that humanity could one day establish a world based on "four fundamental human freedoms": freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. FDR reiterated much of this when he joined Winston Churchill in drafting the Atlantic Charter later that year. He backed up his call for a greater measure of global economic security through his support for the creation of such post-war institutions as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (which later became the World Bank).

Indeed, near the end of his life, the experiences of depression and war had convinced FDR that "true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence" as "necessitous men are not free men," but the stuff with which "dictatorships are made." Moreover, FDR became convinced that in a complex, modern industrial economy, providing such basic economic security is much more than a mere aspiration. It is a necessity, a right, which can and must be protected. Having reached the conclusion that in our own day "these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident," the President went on to make one of the most important -- and least known -- speeches of his career when he called for the establishment of "a Second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all [Americans] -- regardless of station, race, or creed."

With tremendous prescience, President Roosevelt then listed what he considered to be these essential rights, among which were included: the right to a useful and remunerative job; the right to earn enough to provide adequate food, clothing, and recreation; the right of every businessman to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies; the right to a decent home, adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment; and the right to a good education.

As Cass Sunstein has observed in his book "The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need it More than Ever", the Second Bill of Rights sought to protect both opportunity and security and to complete the unfulfilled promise of the American revolution, by making sure -- in an era of fascism -- that every American could enjoy the benefits of liberal, capitalist democracy. At the base of FDR's vision stood his faith in government as an active instrument of social and economic justice; government that was dedicated not to special interests, but to the common good.

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In a world dominated by free-market fundamentalists, the notion of government as an instrument of economic revival and social improvement has almost disappeared from the public consciousness. Yet the problems that FDR sought to address remain with us still -- and in recent years have gotten worse. Today, for example, roughly twenty percent of American children live in poverty, the highest rate among any industrialized nation. We still have approximately 13.5 million people officially unemployed and the unofficial rate is estimated to be much higher. With the new health care reform bill there is some hope that the millions of Americans without health insurance will be covered in the future, but given the current political and legal challenges, this is by no means certain. In the meantime, the costs associated with a higher education continue to climb, as does student debt, which for the first time in American history topped a trillion dollars and now exceeds nation-wide credit card debt.

In Roosevelt's day, GIs returning from fighting overseas could look forward to going to college on the GI Bill (often referred to as "the GI Bill of Rights"), which also provided an array of housing, medical and other benefits. Thanks to the foresightedness of this legislation -- which was the first tangible consequence of FDR's Second Bill of Rights speech -- millions of young men attended college for the first time. In doing so, they not only improved their own lives, they also changed the face of America and drastically improved the productivity of the post-war workforce. All this thanks to a government program designed and dedicated to making higher education affordable for millions of middle and lower-income Americans.

Engaging in serious structural reform and fashioning programs that provide both security and economic opportunity for millions of Americans takes money, vision and leadership. As we struggle past one budget crisis and stumble our way toward the next, it appears that we lack all three of these key ingredients -- and millions continue to suffer because of it. Worse still, a new generation of "self seekers" has once again lured the American public to follow their false leadership, buying into the specious notion that the Great Recession was caused not by reckless bankers and hedge fund managers but by too much government spending. They claim that cutting government expenditures in an economic downturn will lead to more jobs and that the best way to ensure the long-term health of the economy is to shrink government, strip unions of their collective bargaining rights and make the tax cuts on the rich permanent.

Over six decades ago, in the face of a far greater economic crisis, FDR rose the occasion by convincing millions of Americans to follow his vision and to support the transformation of American society through the establishment of the New Deal. Looking back on the causes of the Great Depression, which are remarkably similar to those that cause our current economic crisis, FDR once observed that for too many Americans,

...the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor -- other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.

Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people's mandate to end it.

If we are going to reclaim our mandate to end economic domination by the rich and put our nation back on the path to equality, we are going to need much more than endless calls for tax cuts and an end to government intervention in the economy. We are going to need leaders strong enough to take on the forces of wealth and greed; leaders who will not merely trumpet their ability to cut government spending in a recession, but instead defend the right of government to act directly and decisively to put people to work; leaders dedicated to bringing an end to the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth that has robbed Americans of the purchasing power they need to restore the health of the economy and achieve the same standard of living as their parents. In short, we are going to need leaders with vision, for as FDR said all those years ago, "when there is no vision, the people perish."

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute.