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ORIGINAL: celticlord2112
It is true that historians credit FDR's New Deal with ending the Depression. There is no such clear consensus among economists, however, and are rather evenly divided on the issue, with a significant body of research to support the contention that FDR and the New Deal were counterproductive.
Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute makes a similar argument.
Jim Powell of the Cato Institute argues that FDR's New Deal harmed more than helped poor people.
Burton Folsom, economist and historian from Hillsdale College, stated in a 2004 speech that "the New Deal was an inevitable economic failure." Most telling is the quote he includes from FDR's Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau: "We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. . . . We have never made good on our promises. . . . I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . . And an enormous debt to boot!"
Lawrence Reed of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, arguing that the notion of the New Deal ending the Depression is a myth, points out that a national poll by the American Institute of Public Opinion taken in 1939 reported Americans answered "yes" to the question "Do you think the attitude of the Roosevelt Administration towards business is delaying business recovery?"
Such are facts and history.
You're right that there is a lot of controversy among economists on the exact effects of the New Deal, especially the short-term ones. However, all the institutions you quoted -- the Independent Institute, Cato, Mackinac, and also Hillsdale College -- are ideological think-tank type institutions financed by the conservative movement, not unbiased sources.
A couple of things I would say --
--Roosevelt was elected in 1932, and strong economic growth and employment expansion began again in early 1933, right after his first programs were put in. If you want to talk "facts of history", you need to look at those -- look up U.S. GDP growth from 1928-1940 and you'll see the pattern I'm talking about.
However, the 1928-1932 contraction had been so severe that "catch-up" to pre-Depression employment levels did not occur until 1937. In addition, there was a second recession in 1937, which, while not nearly as severe as the Depression, caused the U.S. economy to slump again. A lot of the argument has to be about the causes of that second recession.
Many of the flaws in the New Deal were because Roosevelt was *not Keynesian enough* -- not willing to borrow large amounts of money and run a big Federal deficit. Even Roosevelt was still prisoner of the old conservative economic thinking that emphasized balanced budgets. WWII -- which featured much more borrowing and much more interference in the economy than the New Deal did -- broke the U.S. definitively out of the Depression era and was followed by unprecedented economic growth.
Finally, while some Roosevelt programs were failures or temporary stopgaps, a large number of New Deal programs -- notably TVA, Social Security, the SEC, the FDIC -- were massive and lasting successes that helped the U.S. economy for many decades to come. The New Deal structure of financial regulation served the economy very well until quite recently (the last decade), when financiers figured out how to route around it during the dot-com and mortgage bubbles. Rural electrification worked. And Social Security, contrary to false right-wing propaganda about a supposed "crisis", has been and continues to be a very successful program that has enormously reduced poverty among the elderly.
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