Immediately after the crash, Hoover, who liked nothing better than emergencies, threw himself into action. He was one of the hardest-working presidents in the history of the office, at his desk by 8:30 a.m and still there into the early hours of the next morning. Within a month, his administration had pushed through an expansion in public works construction and submitted a proposal to Congress to cut the income tax rate by a flat 1.0 percent. The federal government, however, was then tiny—total expenditures amounted to $2.5 billion, only 2.5 percent of GDP—and the effect of the fiscal measures
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