To the editor:

This Sunday, like most Sundays, I went down to my hometown, Garnett. We drove around beautiful Lake Garnett and, on the way there, we passed the public swimming pool and the high school football stadium (Go Bulldogs!). All of these were part of a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) project from the mid-1930s, which I am told that my grandfather worked on. In modern political lingo, the CCC would be a “failed economic stimulus program.”

True, the CCC and other stimulus programs like the Works Projects Administration (WPA) did not completely end the Great Depression, not because they were bad ideas, most economists now agree, but because they weren’t big enough. Still, they put millions of people back to work, created public assets of lasting value, and helped get the American economy working again — until 1937.

In 1937, public spending on the WPA and other stimulus programs was slashed, and the Depression returned. Sound familiar? The United Kingdom is already a year ahead of us down this path and they are already reaping the rewards in the form of rising unemployment and decreasing prosperity. Fortunately, here in the United States we have pragmatic leaders with a good knowledge of history and economics, rather than demagogues with a religious devotion to potentially disastrous social and economic policies, and they would never repeat the mistakes of the past.

On second thought, this might be a good time to start saving acorns for the winter.