Word: dealing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Chief accomplishments: Signed balanced-budget deal; ended federal welfare guarantee...
...self-esteem of those who profited most from the old order. Hatred is happily more fleeting than love. The men who sat in their clubs denouncing "that man in the White House," that "traitor to his class," have died off. Their children and grandchildren mostly find the New Deal reforms familiar, benign and beneficial...
Then F.D.R. appeared, a magnificent, serene, exhilarating personality, buoyantly embodying new ideas, new courage, new confidence in America's ability to regain control over its future. His New Deal swiftly introduced measures for social protection, regulation and control. Laissez-faire ideologues and Roosevelt haters cried that he was putting the country on the road to communism, the only alternative permitted by the either/or creed. But Roosevelt understood that Social Security, unemployment compensation, public works, securities regulation, rural electrification, farm price supports, reciprocal-trade agreements, minimum wages and maximum hours, guarantees of collective bargaining and all the rest were saving capitalism...
...Deal never quite solved the problem of unemployment. Thou0gh F.D.R. was portrayed as a profligate spender, his largest peacetime deficit was a feeble $3.6 billion in 1936--far less, even when corrected for inflation, than deficits routinely produced 50 years later by Reagan. It took World War II and the Defense Department to create deficits large enough to wipe out unemployment, proving the case for a compensatory fiscal policy...
Before F.D.R., the U.S. had had a depression every 20 years or so. The built-in economic stabilizers of the New Deal, vociferously denounced by business leaders at the time, have preserved the country against major depressions for more than a half-century. F.D.R.'s signal domestic achievement was to rescue capitalism from the capitalists...