What steps did President Herbert Hoover take to reduce unemployment during the Great Depression?

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President Hoover created the President's Organization on Unemployment Relief (POUR) in 1931 to generate private contributions to aid the unemployed, but by mid-1932 it closed from a lack of funds. He endorsed a few public works programs like the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington to employ laborers. The Hawley-Smoot Tariff also raised import duties on foreign goods to new heights in hopes of encouraging domestic manufacturing and agriculture. In reality, this just hampered international trade as other nations created their own protective tariffs.

It's important to note that Hoover believed in a very limited government, and even these few actions stretched his ideology greatly.

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Boondoggle, the term in which I was looking for, came to me today when the economist Max Keiser used it on the political panel show 'Have I got News for You'. He used it in reference to the planned HS2 (high speed rail) linking London with Birmingham in the United Kingdom.

On further research I found that the word was first used in 1935 in a New York Times report on the New Deal after it had come to light that $3 million dollars had been spent on recreational activities for the unemployed. Its definition is "a project that is considered a useless waste of both time and money, yet is often continued due to extraneous policy motivations".

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This article seems to be an unbiased analysis of Herbert Hoover's reaction to the Crash of 1929. It paints him as a relative activist economically, by the standards of the day, but both over-hyped during the election of 1928 and overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the collapse that was occurring.

It is worth remembering that he began construction of the eponymous Hoover Dam (approved by Coolidge in December 1928) as one attempt to ease the unemployment of the Depression.

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