Stealing my own comment for here

There are people who say that "What's good for business is good for America".  That the "New Deal" really set out to destroy our country.  People like Mitt Romney and Ron Paul seem to have this belief that taxing the wealthy and giving it to the poor only leads to more poor people bleeding the system dry, leading to dependancy, and driving the rich away.  Instead, just let business do whatever it wants, and things will "work out".

After all, look at our current economy!  Hardly any regulation of the market (or the environment, or food and product safety, or civil rights), the very wealthy absolved of many taxes, education left without proper funding, and the money that could have been spent on roads and health care going instead to fund the War in Iraq - which has made some companies *very* wealthy indeed.

Oh, wait - that's right, our economy is going down the tubes partly because the regulations on the market to make sure things didn't go belly up weren't there, and we had rampant housing speculation leading to billions in bad debts - and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

In 1930, the New Deal was not about "taking the money from the wealthy and giving it to the poor".  That's nothing more than stealing, or communism.

However - it is "taking some money from the wealthy *who have benefited from the systems that supported them, and returning it back to those systems so that they and others can continue to benefit*".

Those who have made their fortunes in America do so because of their own hard work and ingenuity.  And because there is a system of education to help provide them with smarter people.  Roads that for a long time were the backbone of our continental business needs.  Just courts and laws to ensure that people could compete without have to pay off authorities for graft.  Tending to the commons so that all could benefit from clean air and water and healthy food.

Now, we have people attacking the Dept of Education, leaving roads crumbling, telling people that "what's good for business is good for America", without realizing it should be the opposite:  what is good for America is good for business!  Fix the roads - get goods across faster.  Build public transportation systems - give citizens more money to spend on goods while helping them get to work faster, while reducing the price of gas to make goods cheaper to build.

There are those like Ron Paul who don't seem to get that, and while I admire his constitutional ideals, his economics seem to ignore reality.  If anything, the 80's and the last 8 years have proved this out.  "Voodoo economics" don't work - and we should abandon them just as the world abandoned feudalism and communism as bad ideas.

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