Hoover raised the top income tax rate from 25% to 63%. With his approval, the estate tax was doubled and corporate taxes were raised by almost 15%.
Notable Hoover policies and proposals include fifty dollar monthly pensions for Americans over 65. A price-fixing Federal Farm Board. An anti-trust division in the Justice Department. Federal loans for urban slum clearances. A federal Department of Education. And the Anti-Injunction Act, which outlawed yellow dog contracts in which a worker agreed as a condition of employment not to join a labor union.
Some of those became law. Others didn't. They were all bad.
You amke good points Phillip, but we must remember that the economic ideas that Hoover and Mellon followed were of the School of Adam Smith Economics where you focus on balanced budgets, and you raise taxes in a time of economic downturn to meet the lost revenue so one may balalnce the budget. If raising taxes is a consequence of reaching the balanced budget, then so be it. That is what was beleived by a majority of not just politicians, but citizens.
It sounds silly now, but that was the way it worked back then. Balance the budget. FDR maqueraded as a balanced budget advocate in 1932, but also as a "New Dealer." And you thought John Kerry was a flip-flopper. FDR promised less spending, and more spending, in the same damn campaign!
Hoover other "Socialist" ideas were simply Depression measure, and only it the fan under FDR.
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