http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20081024.COBLACK24/TPStory/?query=conrad+black
>From that piece:
"If these workfare Americans are considered to be unemployed, the Roosevelt administration reduced unemployment from 33 per cent in 1933 to 13 per cent in 1936, to less than 10 per cent at the end of 1940, to less than 1 per cent a year later when the U.S. was plunged into the Second World War. If the federal workfare employees are accepted as employed, the corresponding numbers are 33 per cent, 7 per cent, 3 per cent and 0.5 per cent. Virtually all the genuinely unemployed received basic social benefit payments from 1935 on."
Anti-New Deal folks focus laserlike on one economic snapshot, taken in 1938, one of the New Deal's worst years, during a recession after some New Deal successes, and leave the camera focused there, and do not seem to count public works people as genuinely employed.
-B.