Franklin Roosevelt made the Great Depression worse?

Which was a little bit slower than the US.

The United States began emerging from the Depression as it borrowed and spent $1 billion to build its armed forces from 1939 to 1941.

Earlier than that. I would say that it reached the bottom in 1934, but due to some bumbling from Roosevelt’s side, it got another dip later in the thirties.

Yes, because after the successful Keynesian policies of his first administration, FDR reversed course, shrank government & produced a balanced budget - which in 1937 plunged the country back into the Depression he’d almost dug America out of through massive public works programs & deficit spending.

The decifit spending was quite moderate, as FDR didn’t like it. However the reversal of course had an impat, granted. I still believe that they should have let the economy find a bottom by itself. Decifit spending in itself is not a long-term problem, if you make sure that the budget is neutral over the long term. That’s the art and challenge, most pols can’t handle.

Hey Freddy, what a coincidence, I studied in Moscow too. U. of Idaho.

hehehehhehehe, maybe you should be lecturing me on potato growing and not FDR.

U.S. pols actually did a pretty good job of managing the federal government’s debt until the late 1960s, when the financial pressure to pay for Vietnam and the Great Society pushed the United States into a pattern of deficit spending it has never gotten itself out of. It was also helpful that Keynesian economics was the dominant economic paradigm by that time, allowing politicians from LBJ to Nixon to be less cautious about government spending than they would have been in an earlier age.