co-worker says Hoover's spending caused great depression.

We have been having a discusion at work about the current recession and what caused the great depression. A co-worker says that after the stock market crash, Hoover injected some spending into the economy which cause the depression. I was always under the impression that Hoover basically did nothing. Does anyone have some information on this.

that shuts them up faster because they never have facts on their side.

http://www.sparknotes.com/history/american/depression/section4.rhtml

It mentions the main points and the real problem was Hoover did not do enough to help.

(I don't remember whether it was under Hoover or Roosevelt, but since nobody knew how to handle a Depression back then, it seemed like a good idea to contract the money supply-- which turned out to be exactly the wrong thing to do.)

Thanks.

To the OP, suffice to say your "friend" is misinformed. That is the norm for the right wing supporters in America today, though, so it is to be expected. When truth shows that right wing policies failed recently and if you look into the history of boom and bust cycles, recessions, etc. When truth shows that the President is, in fact, a US citizen. When truth shows that Obama is governing more center-right than anything else. The right wing always uses a lie. They can't use the truth because their policies have been proven time and time again to be utter failures. And it is so much easier to just keep making up lie after lie, it forces your opponent to be twice as intelligent as you (they have to actually know history and facts and figures to expose the lie) and it forces your opponent to have to work twice as hard. Lie = easy, no work or actual knowledge required. The leadership of the right wing has an almost diabolical ability to mind wipe their supporters, emptying them of their memory of actual events and all facts, then in step 2 they fill the empty container with talking points and outright lies. When one lie is exposed or stops working they just come up with another lie. Easy-peasy.

aren't they cute.

That certainly belies the facts. In fact, the tax cutting measures (cutting top tax rates from 73% to 24%) of his first Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon, contributed to its severity. Hoover was a great proponent of voluntarism - does that sound familiar? But he wasn't all bad. Congress, in 1932, enacted the largest peacetime tax increase in history and he signed it. In 1932, he tried to rescue the economy somewhat with the Emergency Relief and Construction Act which authorized funds for public works programs. He also created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC). The RFC's initial goal was to provide government-secured loans to financial institutions, railroads and farmers. While the RFC had minimal impact at the time, it was adopted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and greatly expanded as part of his New Deal. Ironically, FDR and his running mate accused Hoover of taxing and spending too much and even leading the US "down the path to socialism."

Hoover is credited with being one of the best Commerce Secretaries ever. But one of his lasting negative legacies was to oust African American leaders in the Republican Party and replace them with whites, thus causing black leadership to break with the Republican Party and support Democratic candidates who supported civil rights.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Hoover

It's almost as if the Democratic and Republican parties totally flip-flopped in many ways during the 1930s.

in his administration to make a difference. He wasted most of his administration trying to cajole the captains of industry to hire people to produce things that no one had the money to buy, something that obviously fell flat. The worst year of the Great Depression, according to most historians, was mid 1931-mid 1932.

Even FDR came into office and did the wrong things for a while, like dumping farm produce in front of hungry people, trying to support the prices, obviously not realizing that people who had no money couldn't buy it at any price. He just realized what the problem was faster than Hoover had and the recovery was born out of a bowl of alphabet soup created by government spending programs that put people back to work and created the demand that had been missing from the economic equation.

Loosening up Federal spending didn't start the Depression and tightening it up wasn't what ended the Depression. Pressure from conservatives in 1936 to balance the budget prolonged it nicely, though, ushering in the great recession of 1937 by ending many of the programs that were working prematurely, a recession that wasn't ended until Federal spending was again increased by WWII.

I'm sorry your friend is an idiot who has been completely propagandized by some monetarist Econ 101 teaching assistant. The cure for that is extensive reading, and I mean reading away from Friedman and other ivory tower theorists who have lately been proven tragically wrong. I'd suggest he start with the Wiki articles and read the bibliography at the bottom of the page to get more of a grip on what actually happened.