First principles.

• Position: THE 1930S FLASHBACK - Upton Sinclair's opinion on the United States economy and President Theodore Roosevelt - Brief article

December 25, 1937, Upton Sinclair

This imitation prosperity could not continue indefinitely because there is a limit to the credit even of the United States government. All our bankers and orthodox economists set up a clamor, and our reactionary newspapers spread it all over the front pages. Government borrowing and spending was going to ruin us; the budget must be balanced before it was too late.

Day and night they shouted this at President Roosevelt, and finally they got his nerve, and he agreed to balance the budget, and began cutting down relief expenditures and stopping public works--and so, of...