That seems a curious statement to me, considering the New Deal was singularly unsuccessful in ending the Great Depression. Similarly, the Great Society foundered just about the time I got out of college looking for work.

The GI bill, on the other hand, had a real positive effect on social mobility, because of the nearly universal male involvement in the military. That's where I part company with many of my fellow conservatives. I think we, as a society, invest way too little in public post-secondary education, and particularly so in California.

When I was a freshman at Berkeley, we had no tuition whatsoever. (Well, at least none to the State of California's benefit. There was a specific, mandatory fee for certain Berkeley services (e.g. the Cowell Hospital and certain other Berkely-specific matters) but it was less than the cost of most of my textbooks. We were outraged when a tuition of $100/quarter was imposed in 1970-71. The expansion of student loans, and the bipartisan effort to make them nondischargable under the Bankruptcy Code, have mainly helped raise the cost of higher education and saddle recent graduates with crippling debt. I suspect that debt has been one more reason why the economy has performed so poorly.