Huey Long

We watched a documentary about the Great Depression last week and Huey Long was brought up for a bit but not really discussed as much. He was a controversial Louisiana political leader, senator, and Louisiana's 40th governor. At first, he agreed with Roosevelt's ideas and policies about how to approach the situation after the Great Depression but after a while, Huey Long came to believe that Roosevelt's New Deal (a series of programs and projects to help US recover after the Great Depression) wasn't enough to help alleviate the poor people's problems, only certain people's. Because of this, he developed what is called the "Share Our Wealth" program on February 23rd in 1934, with the motto of "Every man a king". This program focused on a net established tax that would redistribute the money it collects to those poorer people who are in dire need of money. He promised that with this program, every man in the country would at least have a car, a radio, and a home, all it it being worth 5000 dollars or more. The "Share Our Wealth" program was only one in a series of the plans that Huey Long decided was needed to help America get back on its leg. In 1933, he offered a series of bills, named the "Long Plan" for redistributing the money from the rich to the poor people. It began with a new found tax to those whose fortune is over 100 million dollars. An example of this would be taxing 1% if the person had a million dollars, 4% for 4 million, and etc. The percentage basically corresponds to how many millions of fortune the person had. The second bill he passed limited the annual incomes of everyone to only 1 million dollars. The third one forced everyone to have no more than 5 million dollars as inheritance from family. He proposed to the citizens that his plan would help people to get free education, old age pension, benefits for veterans, federal assistance to farmers, public work projects, limiting work to 30 hours a week, a month of vacation to every worker annually, and etc. He stated the following: "God invited us all to come and eat and drink all we wanted. He smiled on our land and we grew crops of plenty to eat and wear. He showed us in the earth the iron and other things to make everything we wanted. He unfolded to us the secrets of science so that our work might be easy. God called: 'Come to my feast.' Then what happened? Rockefeller, Morgan, and their crowd stepped up and took enough for 120 million people and left only enough for 5 million for all the other 125 million to eat. And so many millions must go hungry and without these good things God gave us unless we call on them to put some of it back." Huey Long made all these promises to appeal to the people, majority agreed and some didn't. But if one looked closely enough, his plan is extremely flawed in my opinion (probably in many others as well).

What would be your opinion regarding Huey Long's plan, regardless of the outcome, would you have actually done something like this just to please the public? Or would you rather tell them the truth and just work as hard as you can to improve the situation?