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December 5, 2009

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Letter: FDR is not the role model to look up to

Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005 | 8:34 a.m.

Virgil Sestini's Oct. 26 letter asked, "Where will we find another FDR who would have the initiative and creative leadership to lead us out of another Great Depression?"

Almost all economists now agree that FDR did exactly the wrong things, and turned a normal cyclical recession into the worst depression that the nation has ever known. Among the bad things he did was to raise taxes on businesses, which then failed by the thousands, forcing millions out of work and depriving us of the goods and services they would have produced.

Without jobs and products created by business, he eventually created the Works Progress Administration, or WPA, and thus created government jobs. However, government jobs do not make anything to export.

He eventually ran for re-election on the phrase "He kept us out of war," and then went to war in World War II. Imagine how many lives would have been saved if we had gone to war against Germany two years earlier. Millions! And Japan did not attack us because we were strong, they attacked because they thought we were weak.

Charles Gould

Las Vegas

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