was also to alleviate the widespread sense of panic consuming the nation. Low confidence in government can cause issues with bonds, stocks, and other finical markets. A nation with such unrest cannot function economically. Perception is important in an economy, and it's difficult to feel like things are improving if poverty is so common. In this way, the goals of these programs were both to help Americans and to improve their confidence in government.

Perhaps what is less often discussed regarding the New Deal is the monetary policies that FDR's administration also took to help alleviate the crisis. There is a debate as to how important monetary policy might have been in the New Deal. One reason many historians focus on fiscal policy is because after the failures of the Hoover administration it was clear that monetary policy alone would not solve the issue; both were important. The New Deal had to make capital (fancy word for money) available for people looking to take loans or start businesses. With deflation so high, one way to solve this problem was to take the United States off of the gold standard, so that the cost of money could go down more easily. This also allowed the government to lower interest rates.

Changes such as Glass-Steagel and tighter government regulation were intended to prevent another economic disaster. This was another goal of the New Deal, but I won't go into too much detail here, since others have already done it so well.

The New Deal had several goals. The main goals were to provide relief to our people and to get our economy going again. When the Great Depression began, many Americans lost their jobs and their life savings. When Roosevelt was elected President, unemployment was at 25%. Thus, Roosevelt immediately went to work to begin his New Deal program. Roosevelt provided various programs to create jobs and provide relief to the American people.

The Civilian Conservation Corps provided jobs to young, unemployed men. They went to the west to work on conservation projects. The Works Progress Administration and the Civil Works Administration provide construction jobs to people. The Public Works Administration provided construction jobs to unemployed workers. It also provided work for unemployed artists, musicians, and writers. These programs were designed to get people working again. President Roosevelt believed that if people were working again, it would help the economy begin to develop and grow.

Other programs provided relief to people. The Glass-Steagall Act insured savings accounts. Bank accounts would now be insured going forward. Farmers were paid not to produce crops with the passage of the Agricultural Adjustment Act. Homeowners received relief also. The Home Owners Loan Corporation refinanced loans of people with jobs. The Farmer Credit Administration refinanced the loans of farmers. The Social Security program was developed to help people upon reaching retirement age.

President Roosevelt realized the government needed to take a very active role in ending the Great Depression. He worked very hard to provide employment and relief to the American people with the many programs that were a part of the New Deal.

The main goals of the New Deal can be expressed in three words: Relief, Recovery, and Reform. The New Deal hoped to provide Relief from the suffering caused by the Great Depression. This was accomplished by the Bank Holiday and removing America from the Gold Standard. Recovery was to put the country back to work and restore the confidence of the American people. Programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, which put young men to work, and the Works Progress Administration were for this purpose. Also important here was the Tennessee Valley Authority which built dams for the production of electricity in poverty stricken areas of Appalachia. The final goal, reform, was to prevent this from happening again. Among the efforts towards recovery were the Glass-Stegall Act which created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; the Social Security Act which provided income for elderly and disabled Americans, and the Federal Securities Act which required disclosure of important information regarding stocks and bonds before they were offered for sale.

The three main goals of the New Deal are usually described as the "three Rs": relief, recovery, and reform. To achieve these goals, the administration of Franklin Roosevelt passed an array of programs and created a number of federal agencies to administer them. I will elaborate on these goals, including some of the programs and agencies that were created, below.

• Relief: By the time Roosevelt was inaugurated in 1933, the nation's economy was mired in the very worst period of the Great Depression. Nearly 1/3 of the nation's workforce was unemployed, and a far greater percentage were underemployed. Banks were closing and businesses were shutting their doors. This led to a desperate need for direct relief, something the federal government had been reluctant to do under FDR's predecessor Herbert Hoover. One major relief program was the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which attempted to provide work, as well as relief payments, to those stricken by the Depression. Like the FERA, the Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC, put people to work, namely young people who worked to combat soil erosion and on other conservation projects. 
• Recovery: A major goal of the programs of the first "Hundred Days", the flurry of programs implemented in 1933, was to bring about economic recovery by stabilizing prices and by putting more money into the economy. The National Recovery Administration (NRA) attempted to regulate wages as well as prices in industry, while the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) tried to do the same for farmers. These were the programs that met with the most resistance from conservatives--the Supreme Court struck down both on the grounds that they involved excessive government intervention in the economy. 
• Reform: Another, and perhaps the most important, goal of the New Deal was to enact structural reforms that would make another economic disaster less likely, removing a degree of uncertainty from American capitalism and from the lives of the American people. One example was the FDIC, or Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. This program insured bank deposits, making people less likely to panic and remove their funds from banks as they had done in the  bank panics of the early 1930s. Congress also passed the Glass-Steagall Act, which limited the investments that banks could make. Finally, the Social Security Act created a pension for the elderly financed by a payroll tax.