FDR's Economic Thinking Deteriorated Over Time

It turns out that FDR wasn't always a Keynesian. Before he was president, he was skeptical of government spending as a panacea for economic downturns. Lawrence O'Donnell reports:

Mike Konzcal of The Next New Deal, with the help of folks over at the FDR Presidential Library, have uncovered a fascinating piece of historical skepticism in Roosevelt’s old copy of William Foster and Waddill Catchings’ The Road to Plenty (1928), a book that put forward a prototype of Keynes’ “General Theory” eight years before the famous economist formalized it himself. Inside the front cover, under his name and the date, Roosevelt scrawled: “Too good to be true–you can’t get something from nothing.” 

Eventually Roosevelt’s skepticism faded. As MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell noted in the Rewrite Tuesday, “by the time Roosevelt took the oath of office as president in 1933, he had in effect become a Keynesian, a follower of the most prominent advocate of government spending during a recession.”