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We feel more patriotic when the government splashes the cash | Torsten Bell

Roosevelt’s New Deal spending even made Americans more likely to lay down their lives for their country

Times change. JFK might have told Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you”, but 30 years earlier FDR’s New Deal was all about what the state could do to help Americans out of the huge Wall Street crash-induced depression they’d fallen into.

But what was the effect of Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal, which saw US federal spending rise from 4% of GDP in 1933, to more than 9% by the end of the decade? Most answers to that question focus on its impact on unemployment and the economy. But an imaginative study has examined its impact on Second World War patriotism.

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Source: US Politics - theguardian.com


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