The Pros And Cons Of The New Deal Programs

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By the time Franklin D. Roosevelt entered office in 1933, about 25% of United States workers were unemployed. Roosevelt’s plan to combat the Great Depression was called the New Deal Program, and he spent a large amount of time working to get his New Deal policies passed in order to help his country’s people. While the New Deal Program was able to bring relief to some, it failed to bring the United States out of the depression by the time it had run its course in 1939, leaving many unemployed and unsatisfied. The program even extended the Great Depression, due to poor handling of the situation. While it was able to bring jobs and income to some of the nation’s needy, the New Deal Program was still flawed in several ways. Some of the criticisms voiced about the flaws of the New Deal …show more content…

They claimed that the people could have pulled themselves out of the depression if the government had stepped back, and continued on to say that private enterprise “was being stifled by a ‘planned economy’ and ‘creeping socialism’” (Kennedy, 567), which shows a distaste for the way that the government was handling the situation and how it caused the depression to worsen rather than improve. On the opposite side of the spectrum, there were people who believed that the government wasn’t doing enough to help pull the nation out of the depression. Charles Fusco said that “unless we get the crooks and chislers out of Washington, we’ll remain the same” (Fusco), showing his displeasure for how the Roosevelt administration were handling things and saying that the government needed to change in order to improve the economy in a fast and effective way. Despite these two arguments being on completely different sides, they show that the New Deal was seen by many as ineffective and that it caused the Great Depression to drag out longer than

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