The New Deal Provides No Support for Obama's Big Govt. Plan

From the Independent Institute: 

President-elect Barack Obama is looking to FDR as a model in battling the recession. Yet, as Independent Institute Senior Fellow and historian Robert Higgs has shown, FDR’s policies never ended the Depression—which in fact lasted until 1945—and thus the New Deal should only be seen as a foolish model for extending economic malaise for more than a decade. Higgs’s analysis of the bailouts and other economic troubles has been cited by everyone from the Christian Science Monitor to John Stossel to the New York Times to Rush Limbaugh. 

Also, even if the New Deal in a small way helped boost the U.S. economy, that's little evidence the help today would outweight its liabilities. Then, the U.S. was hegemonic. Today, China and India are competing with us, and winning. We can't afford to spend huge percentages of GDP on schemes that the private sector deemed unprofitable. That is likely to accelerate the U.S.'s decline.