The Wall Street Journal editorial page looks at recent liberal efforts to attack conservative economic policy as a Herbert Hoover “Let the economy sink” approach and responds:
To hear [Sen. Chuck] Schumer and his fellow-traveling columnists tell it, Hoover’s great policy blunder was to do nothing, all the while insisting that everything was fine. But the problem with Hoover’s economic policy isn’t that it was passive but that it was actively destructive.
In 1930, he signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, setting off a wave of protectionist retaliation that undid the globalization of the preceding decades and did far more harm to the world economy than the stock-market crash ever did. Two years later, amid a bad recession, he undid the Calvin Coolidge-Andrew Mellon tax cuts, raising the top marginal income-tax rate to 63% from 25%. The recession became a Depression.