Column: The New Deal has lessons for the coronavirus crisis — but not the ones you think

As a student of the New Deal, I’m often asked what’s most surprising about what I learned. Here’s how he responded The term “socialism” has been enjoying something of a vogue lately, typically used to describe policies that were part of American mainstream politics as recently as the 1980s. Hopkins cherished a remark uttered by the wife of one of these workers: “We aren’t on relief anymore, my husband’s working for the government.” The works program most closely identified with the New Deal was the Works Progress Administration, or WPA. Hopkins brushed off criticism that some of the projects were mere make-work or research projects, rather than lasting productions — one politician’s investigation of the WPA added the term “boondoggle” to the political lexicon, drawn from midwestern slang denoting small-scale handicrafts. Fiscal austerity, which had been the watchword of the Hoover administration and even held sway within the Roosevelt White House, remained economic orthodoxy in the U.S. To the extent that deficit-financed pump-priming was part of the New Deal, it was almost accidental: New Deal projects did keep money in circulation and kept aggregate demand afloat, and it was deficit-financed.