Unlike many conservatives, I applaud some of the New Deal, and, no, I don't think FDR was a communist, but he sure had a lot of them around him, including his VP, Henry Wallace.   The face of poverty throughout the first two-thirds of the 20th Century was rural, agricultural America.   Even JFK used an image of a white woman from Appalachia as his poverty program image.   The New Deal had as its primary purpose producing a "portable" workforce.   Social Security relieved the kids of the duty to stay on the farm to support aging parents so they could go to the big town and work in a factory.   The FLSA and the NLRA ended the race-based death spiral of wages that had so hampered industrialization in The South.   We need to make it possible for the young people in rural Alaska to leave for a viable life style just like the young people left the subsistence farm or ranch and the small town 50 - 75 years ago.   There's nothing left but the dead and dying in my little town h/t Billy Joel.