I wrote in my last article about Demand Shock. Because so much money has moved toward the top, toward the wealthiest among us, the inequality of income is starting to heal the wealthy and make everyone else a little sick. Economic growth in this recovery has been painfully slow. QE has done more to raise the cost of living for most, and to secure the wealthy a perpetual position in the economic chain. This is no different from what happened in the Great Depression, so that FDR could say this:

“…our basic trouble was not an insufficiency of capital. It was an insufficient distribution of buying power coupled with an over-sufficient speculation in production. While wages rose in many of our industries, they did not as a whole rise proportionately to the reward to capital, and at the same time the purchasing power of other great groups of our population was permitted to shrink. We accumulated such a superabundance of capital that our great bankers were vying with each other, some of them employing questionable methods, in their efforts to lend this capital at home and abroad. I believe that we are at the threshold of a fundamental change in our popular economic thought, that in the future we are going to think less about the producer and more about the consumer. Do what we may have to do to inject life into our ailing economic order, we cannot make it endure for long unless we can bring about a wiser, more equitable distribution of the national income.”  

 FDR, who was considered a great man and great president by the people who needed his help at the time, was determined to stop much of the speculation that led to the Great Depression, while giving the working poor something to accomplish at fair wages. Out of this time came Hoover Dam and ultimately the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, home to two million people. To say government is incapable of creating jobs and opportunity is a mistake, or maybe just propaganda.

Government cannot continually be creating all opportunity, or you have failures like in the old Soviet Union. But FDR was not a total failure at all. More money was distributed to people who could create demand, the regular men and women on the main street through his work programs. Families owed their very existences to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's vision to help in times of trouble. .