How does government pay its employers? From money confiscated via taxation from productive, working people.

Yeah, working people like Bernie Madoff, Roland Arnall, Angelo Mozilo and Dick Fuld.

The idea that "private" money is somehow more "productive" than "public" money is the centerpiece of right wing frootbattery. It has absolutely no basis in reality what-so-ever.

In reality, the private sector is even more likely to waste money in spectacularly non-productive endeavors than the public sector, precisely because so much of its decision making process happens behind closed doors with no accountability or even knowledge of the shareholders. The more concentrated private wealth becomes in the hands of greedy, corrupt idiots the more spectacular the flameouts become.

In this case, private corporations managed to crater the entire financial services sector. These same criminal incompetents then turned around and begged legislative representatives (which they'd bought and paid for) to confiscate working taxpayers money to provide trillions of dollars in corporate handouts to cover their own greed-driven mistakes. Socialism for billionaires.

Now that the incoming Obama Administration is making noises about spending an equally large sum of money on programs to stimulate useful economic activity, these corporate fuckups' useful-idiots on the right are starting to whine like a buzz saw.

I mean, God forbid anybody spend money on productive economic activity. Why, that might pull money away from some of Wall Street's massive scams!!! Dick Fuld might have to get a real job or something, you know where your performance gets evaluated and you have to actually demonstrate you know what you're doing and everything.

What a catastrophe!

Objectivly, the New Deal was created in, about, '34 and by '39 or '40 there was not any perceptable movement on the economic front.

Is someone pumping crack into your water supply? None of this is especially difficult to research.

Go to http://www.measuringworth.org/usgdp/ and plot the GDP from 1920 - 1950. Pay special attention to the per-capita GDP figures from 1929 thru 1940. It plummets from '29 thru '33, then takes off like a rocket thru '37, when Roosevelt tried to balance the budget like a classic rightwinger. Whoops. Then war spending cranks up and the economy goes nuts.

As a cure for the Great Depression, government spending didn't work. In 1933, federal government outlays were $4.5 billion; by 1940 they were $9.4 billion, so FDR more than doubled federal spending, and still unemployment remained stubbornly high.

Stubbornly high, but down to around half of what it had been when that hack Hoover and his Republican cronies in Congress were kicked to the curb by voters.

That's millions of people back to work in the private sector, feeding their families, putting a roof over their heads and spending money in the economy. The unemployment numbers also don't even take into account the millions more put to work by the WPA, many of them building things that were of far more lasting economic value than the crap the private sector had invested billions in prior to the crash of '29 - much of it money that literally evaporated overnight, with NOTHING to show for it.

I'd say that government debt during the Great Depression was money well-spent, though as World War II proved Roosevelt's problem wasn't that he spent too much - it's that he never spent enough. Keynes was ultimately proven correct, which shouldn't come as a terrible surprise since he was probably one of the most intelligent people who ever lived, and the era dominated by his policy recommendations will likely go down as the most prosperous in human history.

Smoot-Hawley triggered a trade war which exacerbated the problem.

Sorry, you've provided no evidence to support such an opinion. There were strong domestic pressures arguing for increased tariffs in all of our major trading partners at the time - there might well have been a "trade war" even if it weren't for Smoot-Hawley.

Beyond that, in the grip of the Great Depression the international system of trade - lubricated then as now by funny money from the clowns on Wall Street - collapsed. No tariffs required.

I mean, come on kiddies. We're talking about a 6% tax increase here. Hardly the end of the world. Tariffs didn't come close to the levels they'd been at just 20 years before, let alone back in the 1800's.

The free trade goonsquad also ignores another obvious fact - tariffs generate revenue for the Federal government. That decreases the amount of money it needs to tax from its own businesses and citizens. That leaves more money in their pockets to buy goods and services - both domestic and, yes Virginia, foreign.

Anyhow, FDR didn't sign Smoot-Hawley into law. You can thank that Republican idiot Hoover for signing that Republican piece of legislation into law. If you really think Smoot-Hawley was a disaster, that's just one more reason to never vote Republican.

Like anyone who's sane needs another reason to never vote Republican.