You are correct, sir.
Drought and climate were issues, no doubt about it, but this bailout still probably wouldn't have been necessary if the Federal Reserve hadn't totally mismanaged the monetary situation. That was the root cause of the Depression in my opinion.
The new chairman of the Federal Reserve has admitted that it did indeed cause the Great Depression. I'd say such an admission qualifies as "conclusive":
http://www.federalreserve.gov/BOARDDOCS/SPEECHES/2002/20021108/default.htm
If that's accurate, I honestly wasn't aware of it. I'd like to see your source just out of curiousity. However, that doesn't counter my argument because his tax increase totally reversed this action. He made the increases based on liberal/collectivist reasoning, that a tax increase would reduce the deficit, but it just doesn't work like that. What he did was scare the living bejesus out of the producers and entreprenuers in this country. Can you imagine having your tax rate suddenly go from 25% to 63%???? That would put most people into panic mode, even if they were doing well financially. That is a massive tax increase.
Yes, but it was really just a drop in the bucket compared to the later levels during WW2 that finally actually did bring us out of the Depression.
This was a terrible, terrible policy. I prefer tariffs to taxes, and that is the way our government was intended to operate nnder the original intent of the Constitution, but anything over 15% is going to create problems - especially in a world with rapid transit, such as ours.
Well, then what good is he as a principled leader if he compromises his principles? Answer - not much good.
Hoover is certainly not entirely to blame, as the real culprits were enacted under Wilson in 1913 - the Unholy Trinity of the Income Tax, the Federal Reserve Act and an interventionist foreign policy(the last of the 3 was still not much of a factor at that time though).
Those were factors, but I don't think they were the major ones. As for the bank failures, yes, we definitely had an issue with that, but it was a situation in which corruption in government was preventing the proper authorities from taking action and cleaning the mess up before it became a problem, which is one of government's legitimate roles. For more details of that banking history see:
http://www.strike-the-root.com/51/hargis/hargis2.html
Thanks.
