elzoog wrote: "You realize that many "liberal" policies were started by Nixon right?"
Perfect. This is history as taught by Anne Coulter. Along with "McCarthy was right" and "Hoover was a Keynesian". Conservatives elected Nixon, re-elected him and forced him into resignation when they, finally, withdrew their support, (thank you Ed Gurney).
As for Hoover, I'll quote Brad DeLong who says it more succinctly than I could. He's responding to someone who's quoting virtually the same numbers that elzoog is using and putting them into proper context.
"I think that Megan McArdle's major problem is that she is looking at one table in OMB's Historical Tables. She is not reading Hoover's Budget Messages or any other documents from the Hoover administration, not reading histories of the Hoover administration, not identifying how what congress finally enacted and what Hoover signed differed from what Hoover had originally proposed--or indeed, at how as the Great Depression deepened Hoover decided at the very start of calendar year 1932--halfway through fiscal year 1932--to push for measures (Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Home Loan Bank, direct loans to fund state Depression relief programs) that increased spending--but did so alongside the Revenue Act of 1932 that increased taxes.
After he decided that he was President and that the Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon whom he had inherited from Coolidge worked for him, Hoover did decide to do something to fight the Great Depression. Tax increases to try to balance the budget in order to call down the confidence fairy made up the biggest part of his plan. But Hoover also sought to fund state relief. And he sought to set up GSE's (RTC, HLB) to restart broken capital markets.
But to say that "Hoover was no budget-cutter" misses most of the story. Hoover would have been a budget-cutter in normal times. Hoover was a budget-balancer. Hoover held the line against powerful political forces that sought to increase government spending in the Great Depression for fully 2 1/2 years before endorsing what seem to us to be half-measures."
In Twain's words, "There are three types of lies. Lies, damned lies, and statistics". elzoog has submitted the latter. Or perhaps a better quote from Johns and Quay is more appropriate: "...he knows the words but not the music.".