When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her allies proposed a new stimulus package to take on climate change and income inequality, they called it the Green New Deal. Their reasoning for the economic program’s name is obvious. It pays homage to the New Deal, a bundle of transformative economic reforms captained by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Like the original New Deal, the Green New Deal includes massive government intervention in the American economy through more spending, regulation, and taxes.

While many liberals are enthusiastic over the Green New Deal, it’s worth going back to examine the record of the original New Deal and the Great Depression. What many people fail to understand is that Roosevelt won the 1932 presidential election largely because his predecessor’s policies of government intervention made the economy worse. President Herbert Hoover has often been remembered over decades as a failed, do-nothing president who let the economic collapse get worse and worse. But the problem with this view of Hoover is that it only analyzes his presidency from FDR’s perspective.