Starting with the New Deal in the 1930′s then moving to the present, the impact the United States will become visible. The New Deal was a series of entitlement programs instigated in the United States in the 1930’s. The programs were formed in response to the Great Depression. America was in dire straits three years after the crash of 1929. 34 million Americans had no income whatsoever. The New Deal's eventual impact went beyond staving off social upheaval, re-establishing trust in the currency, and putting people back to work. The Americans started to think of their government as a solution to problems. Roosevelt stopped pushing New Deal legislation by 1938, after the courts ruled some programs unconstitutional. In the short term, the New Deal helped to make the Depression less of a problem. It did not really end the Depression, but it helped. Long term, it has had huge consequences that we can feel today. Politically, this changed our outlook. It made us assume that the government was going to take care of us and it got the government way more involved in the economy. Though the programs resulted in some great things, the long term effects are distressing.
Performing a cost-benefit analysis will provide further insight onto this issue. The partial success of the New Deal taught Americans bad lessons about the role of government, or lessons that hurt us in the future. The cost of entitlement programs can be very expensive for the United States government to maintain in the long term. In order to keep entitlement programs going, the government is often forced to raise taxes and reduce spending in other areas. Once the government sets up some kind of entitlement program, it is usually very difficult to reduce spending on it, and it is often impossible to remove it. Today, much of the entitlements from the New Deal and others still haven’t been paid for. The National debt is already so high that continuing these programs will not aid us in the long run but will further hinder the economy. Moving on to addressing the benefits of entitlements, one of the most striking benefits of the New Deal was the restoration of confidence of a deeply discouraged population. It resulted in the recovery from 25% unemployment to roughly 10% unemployment, the rebound from 50% of industrial