Cowen in the NYT on FDR and Obama

I've written about this a bunch of times, but here's Tyler Cowan [a George Mason econ prof] in the NYT (hat tip: Conservative Edge) on Obama and the possibility of an FDR re-dux...

Many people are looking back to the Great Depression and the New Deal for answers to our problems. But while we can learn important lessons from this period, they’re not always the ones taught in school.

The traditional story is that President Franklin D. Roosevelt rescued capitalism by resorting to extensive government intervention; the truth is that Roosevelt changed course from year to year, trying a mix of policies, some good and some bad. It’s worth sorting through this grab bag now, to evaluate whether any of these policies might be helpful.

If I were preparing a “New Deal crib sheet,” I would start with the following lessons:

Monetary policy is key: The single biggest cause of the Great Depression was that the Federal Reserve let the money supply fall by one-third...Roosevelt’s best policies were those designed to increase the money supply, get the banking system back on its feet and restore trust in financial institutions.

A study of the 1930s by Christina D. Romer, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley (“What Ended the Great Depression?,” Journal of Economic History, 1992), confirmed that expansionary monetary policy was the key to the partial recovery of the 1930s. The worst years of the New Deal were 1937 and 1938, right after the Fed increased reserve requirements for banks, thereby curbing lending and moving the economy back to dangerous deflationary pressures....

Get the small things right: It’s not just monetary and fiscal policies that are important. Roosevelt instituted a disastrous legacy of agricultural subsidies and sought to cartelize industry, backed by force of law. Neither policy helped the economy recover. He also took steps to strengthen unions and to keep real wages high. This helped workers who had jobs, but made it much harder for the unemployed to get back to work. One result was unemployment rates that remained high throughout the New Deal period....

Don't raise taxes in a slump: The New Deal’s legacy of public works programs has given many people the impression that it was a time of expansionary fiscal policy, but that isn’t quite right. Government spending went up considerably, but taxes rose, too. Under President Herbert Hoover and continuing with Roosevelt, the federal government increased income taxes, excise taxes, inheritance taxes, corporate income taxes, holding company taxes and “excess profits” taxes....