Republicans now want to cut both Social Security and Medicare.

No, they never have. They have variously proposed raising the retirement age and privatizing Social Security, with effect for those significantly younger than the current retirement age, and they've proposed requiring the States to pay more for their own Medicare costs and get fewer transfer payments from the Feds.

I wish Social Security would be privatized. The monies should be for the payer's own future retirement and not immediate transfers to strangers' current retirement. Aside from that, there's fiscal reality: we can't afford the transfers anymore. When Social Security was invented, the worker:retiree ratio was 7:1, and a retiree generally died in his early 70s. Today, the worker:retiree ratio is less than 3:1 and declining, and a retiree generally dies in his 80s, with that actuarial datum extending into longer life (the Wuhan Virus' impact on life spans notwithstanding).

Similarly, Medicare transfer payments to the States should be put on a declining block grant basis until after [10] years no more transfer payments are made. Let the citizens of each State keep their tax money for their own State's use.

Regarding the Great Depression and government response, compare that with the Depression of the early '20s. The Great Depression was exacerbated and extended by price and wage controls and by FDR's confiscating everyone's privately held gold, not by spending per se, and the markets merely reflected that.

Eric Hines