This line of argument would only seem to hold if taxes were immediately made due, and if ‘the people’ were taxed equally, and if, well, if the government collected more taxes during that time period.

wikipedia time!

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Business

Franklin D. Roosevelt[...]blamed the excesses of big business for causing an unstable bubble-like economy.[...]believed the problem was that business had too much power, and the New Deal was intended as a remedy, by empowering labor unions and farmers and by raising taxes on corporate profits. Regulation of the economy was a favorite remedy. [...]the Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Reserve, and Social Security won widespread support.

Lack of government deficit spending

[...]Keynes argued [...]that lower aggregate expenditures in the economy contributed to a mbumive decline in income and employment that was well below the average. In this situation, the economy might have reached a perfect balance, at a cost of high unemployment. Keynesian economists called for governments during times of economic crisis to pick up the slack by increasing government spending and/or cutting taxes.

Mbumive increases in deficit spending, new banking regulation, and boosting farm prices did start turning the U.S. economy around in 1933,[citation needed] but it was a slow and painful process. The U.S. had not returned to 1929’s GNP for over a decade and still had an unemployment rate of about 15% in 1940—down from 25% in 1932. The unemployment problem was not solved until the post-World War II decontrolling of the command wartime economy in 1946.”

The key point here is that taxes were only raised on those divisions of the population that had large amounts of money, i.e. major conglomerated businesses.

In terms of debate over the idea of the New Deal lengthening the Great Depression, I’ll admit there isn’t consensus, but it’s not clear why, or where it’s coming from:

“Virtually all historians believe that the New Deal helped resolve the Great Depression, but economists are less certain, with a substantial minority believing that it either had no great impact or worsened the depression.[36] A 1995 survey of economic historians asked whether “Taken as a whole, government policies of the New Deal served to lengthen and deepen the Great Depression.” Of those in economics departments 27% agreed, 22% agreed ‘with provisos’ (what provisos the survey does not state) and 51% disagreed. Of those in history departments, only 27% agreed and 74% disagreed. [1]

The minority view is[...]that the New Deal “cartelization policies are a key factor behind the weak recovery.” They say that the “abandonment of these policies coincided with the strong economic recovery of the 1940s.”[...] that the “Great Depression was very significantly prolonged in both its duration and its magnitude by the impact of New Deal programs.” They suggest that without Social Security, work relief, unemployment insurance, mandatory minimum wages, and without special government-granted privileges for labor unions, business would have hired more workers and the unemployment rate during the New Deal years would have been 6.7% instead of 17.2%.[38]”

The arguments suggesting that the New Deal worsened or lengthened the Great Depression rest on the intuition that businesses would have, for some reason, hired more workers, despite a lack of increased demand for products, or the capital for purchasing products. As stated before, arguments using statistical analysis placing the worst part of the Great Depression after the institution of the New Deal only apply if one bumumes economic change is instantaneous.

A better argument against the New Deal policies might involve FDR’s erosion of executive limits on power- it’s set some precedents that can theoretically be seen today in the Bush administration, particularly in regard to changes in the Supreme Court. Regardless, it would be educational to at least read the wikipedia articles I’ve cited, as I left out several wrinkles for space reasons.