re: #502 Mosh

Memorize this “Hoover raised taxes and raised spending”.
Link

Hoover is widely blamed for worsening the economy by signing the Smoot-Hawley law. But that was a tariff; Hoover’s record on taxes is more complicated. He did sign the Revenue Act of 1932, which more than doubled the top income tax rate and probably worsened the nation’s already dire economic situation. But that law came three years after the Depression began, so for the first three years of his tenure, the economic outlook worsened without any assistance from a tax hike. Indeed, the tax laws then in force were initiated by steep tax cuts urged by long-serving Republican Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon and enacted under Hoover’s predecessors, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge — not necessarily a winning argument in favor of low taxation. Finally, Hoover did in one instance reduce taxes rather than raise them: He signed a joint congressional resolution that cut taxes by 1 percentage point on Dec. 16, 1929, shortly after the stock market crash of 1929.

AND

Even if tax cuts happened to coincide with recoveries and tax hikes tended to coincide with recessions, it doesn’t necessarily mean that one causes the other. For instance, tax cuts and deregulation likely aided the Reagan recovery (as did Volcker’s inflation-fighting efforts) but historians say that higher defense spending, another Reagan priority, also helped bring the United States out of recession, as did historically lower oil prices. Meanwhile, Kennedy, in addition to cutting taxes, supported major increases in public works spending, not least the space program. The implementation of so many policies at the same time makes it hard to credit just one or two with launching a recovery.

Seem to be the key takeways for me.

What ended the Great Depression if it was FDR’s New Deal?