by Katy Grimes
As Appearing in the California Globe
‘Expensive but necessary’ according to lawmakers
“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.”
~Henry Morgenthau Jr., Secretary of the Treasury and close friend to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and architect of the New Deal.
As California Globe reported early Monday, Assemblyman Rob Bonta (D-Oakland) held a press conference to announce the California Green New Deal Act. Bonta said the Act is needed “to boldly address the impacts of climate change and issues of equity throughout the state.”
“Science is telling us what to do,” Bonta said, and noted that his bill will be “big and expensive, but necessary.”
“The existential threat of climate change” is what led Bonta to draft this “big ambitious bill,” over concerns of the “limitless danger with climate change.”
“Just like FDR’s New Deal in 1932, this will meet todays greatest challenge – climate change,” Bonta said. “It’s an existential threat.”
FDR’s New Deal wasn’t the success that many claim it was. Henry Morgenthau Jr., Secretary of the Treasury and close friend to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the primary architect of FDR’s New Deal, admitted seven years later, “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.” Historian Burton Folsom, the author of “New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America,” said Morgenthau made this “startling confession” during the seventh year of the New Deal. I attended a speech Folsom gave about the New Deal, and bought and read his book.
