Who would I have rather had as a friend? Hoover, any day of the year. Hoover couldn't promise folks the world and did not take upon himself dictatorial powers to provide handouts. He was not nearly as ambitious - which can be a good thing in a man who already has a sizable amount of power and influence.

The stock market speculation that brought about the depression was like a version of the great IPO swindles and stock fraud that went unchecked and then crashed in the mid-to-late 1990's.

Look at the world FDR has created Robert - and look at the way it is headed. I know a LOT of folks who have 70 hour work weeks, two jobs, no time to spend with their kids who live in perpetual forms of daycare until they are 12 or so and can fend for themselves.

The average house could be purchased for $3000 before the war, Robert.

Three thousand dollars.

Now the same size home can cost $550,000 in California (or 150k in Tulsa, OK) and is either being lived in by four generations of a Vietnamese family or has been passed on to the children of the original owner who lease or rent it out to tap the money in the desperate CA renter real estate market. When it is finally resold it will not be sold to the middle class.

Your assertion there was no middle class before FDR is quite absurd. There was a substantial middle class. You are mistaking the industrial boom and manufacturing boom with wealth.

The pre-fab homes that started appearing after the war, the doo-dads like vacuum cleaners, blenders and cheaper automobiles made the middle class income go further than it did in the 30s. Thus was born the middle class you think was created by FDR. The private sector with many new industries help to employ lots of Americans. Foreign workers were still associated with shoddy products and inferior goods. Made in Japan or made in Italy meant it was cheap.

The modern day middle class is going to be obsolete soon. Or more appropriately their buying power will be diminished in such ways they will be perpetual leasers/renters of property the way the lower classes used to be in Hoover's time.

They will lease their car, never making any capital out of it. They will rent or lease their homes/condos/apartments and will not get any property tax deduction for their expenditures. They will work 3 times as long as their ancestors did and have nothing to show for it save for a dial-up internet connection that makes them feel empowered and video games and television to suck up whats left of their free time.

Is this the world you seek, Robert? A middle class in name only? A middle class that lives like the poor of yesterday and only has comfort in electronic gadgets?

That is the FDR legacy - an unsustainable handout mentality - hardly better than Lenin and his worker's paradise.

It is collapsing around us, even now - day by day, hour by hour.

FDR isn't the only one, though his policies have nearly bankrupted the nation and indebted each American instead of enriching them. Combine his short-term mindset with the onslaught from our poor, uneducated neighbor nations and you have a formula for disintegration of the middle class, and even the upper middle class, and the creation of HUGE poor class and a tiny super rich class.

My Grandpa thought FDR was great too. He didn't last long enough to see how the great experiment would end. I heard plenty of hard luck tales of folks scouring alleys for stuff to sell - or eat. Stealing and crime in abundance. Shoeless kids and adults alike. Apple sellers and soup lines.

My grandfather set up a soup line for the poor in his shop for a day once a week for a month when he could afford it. The photos with a line wrapping around the building and down the street are mute testimony to the masses poverty. The tales I heard of the time were heart-wrenching. America had a preview of life living in Mexico.

But the tales of tomorrow will be equally heart wrenching.

It will go out with a whimper - not a bang. The middle class is being slaughtered every day. Corporations everywhere are cutting all commission sales and hiring part-timers with no benefits to speak of. Manufacturers that have not already stopped all US production are on the way to doing so as we speak or will be within five years.

The 20 year old middle class youth of today will retire in poverty. If they are lucky, or smart, they may move to a nation on the rise.