the.com/new deal

America's midlife crisis response: instead of a sports car, it bought itself a government.

means A sweeping set of government programs, public works, and financial reforms enacted in the 1930s to pull the U.S. out of the Great Depression and put people back to work.

from The phrase itself is older poker and card-table slang — 'a new deal' meaning a fresh hand, a chance to start over once the old one has gone bad. Franklin D. Roosevelt borrowed that gambler's image in his 1932 presidential nomination speech, promising 'a new deal for the American people,' and the name stuck to the flood of agencies and programs — Social Security, the WPA, the FDIC among them — that followed. Some credit also goes to earlier uses of the phrase in American political writing before Roosevelt, so he popularized it rather than coined it outright.

timeframe
1933 to 1939, roughly 100 alphabet agencies born
not planned
FDR campaigned on balanced budgets, then reversed course entirely
supreme court
struck down key parts before FDR tried packing it
lasting legacy
social security and FDIC still standing, nearly a century later
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