Guest Author - Tracey-Kay Caldwell We often think of the New
Deal as the birth of the welfare state, however, Robert D.
Leighninger Jr.’s book, Long Range Public Investment: The
Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal, reminds us that the New Deal
bought us much more, and much of it is still here today. Picnic
tables in national forests, tennis court at the city park,
auditoriums, schools, hospitals, even botanical gardens, zoos,
fairgrounds, city halls and fire departments, these were all
things that were built as part the jobs programs of the New Deal
that are still in use today. But we got more than just physical
infrastructure from the New Deal, the economic policies of the
New Deal laid the groundwork for our parents and grandparents to
have a middle class life style. With bridges and levies failing,
we sometimes forget that Americans used to take pride in their
infrastructure, that they didn’t mind that their tax dollars
were being spent to invest in America. Leighninger reminds us
that, “John Quincy Adams and