Dunleavy budget expert claims government spending caused Great Depression

While checking into the decision by Gov. Mike Dunleavy to get expert advice from Ohio about the wisdom of his anti-tax ideas, I came across a video in which Donna Arduin claims that economists and historians are wrong about the Great Depression.

This is not an April Fools’ Day joke.

Here, a decade ago, she claims that an increase in government spending under FDR turned a financial crisis into the Great Depression. Furthermore, she said it’s simple and easy to understand.

Like every loyal follower of Charles and David Koch, Arduin knows that the government is always to blame.

As Alaska’s temporary budget director, earning $195,000 a year, she has brought this crackpot theory from the Koch Network to Juneau. Government spending, in her words, “destimulates” the ecomomy.

Speaking at a press conference about a report her company did for the Buckeye Institute in 2009, Arduin was asked what lessons could be drawn from the 1930s. The YouTube video has had 34 views in 10 years.

“That’s a great question and a great softball for us because the destimulative effects of all of the federal government spending, at that point and every point in the U.S. history where we’re able to track data, have proven that those higher levels of government spending have actually destimulated the economy, and prolonged the recessions, in many cases, depression in that case, arguably that created a Depression out of a financial crisis back in the 30s.”
”You know, we didn’t climb, the country didn’t climb out of that until the 1950s. Arguably there was a war in there, but you know, that only makes the case that it might have lasted even longer. If the federal government hadn’t been spending at those rates, had not created such a high government expenditure wedge, then we, as we are projecting today, would project that the private economy would have grown much more quickly.”