Fiscal policy is any changes the government makes to the national budget to influence a nation's economy. "An essential purpose of this Financial Report is to help American citizens understand the current fiscal policy and the importance and magnitude of policy reforms essential to make it sustainable. A sustainable fiscal policy is explained as the debt held by the public to Gross Domestic Product which is either stable or declining over the long term" (Bureau of the fiscal service). The approach to economic policy in the United States was rather laissez-faire until the Great Depression. The government tried to stay away from economic matters as much as possible and hoped that a balanced budget would be maintained. Prior to the Great Depression, the economy did have economic downturns and some were quite severe. However, the economy tended to self-correct so the laissez faire approach to the economy tended to work. President Franklin D. Roosevelt first instituted fiscal policies in the United States in The New Deal. The first experiments did not prove to be very effective, but that was in part because the Great Depression had already lowered the expectations of business so drastically. History The Great Depression The Great Depression struck countries in the late 1920s and continued throughout the entire 1930's. It affected some countries more than others, and the effects in the US were detrimental. In 1933, 25 percent of all workers were unemployed in America. Many families starved or lost their homes. Some tried traveling to the West to find work, also to no avail. The Great Depression showed the American population that there was a growing need for the government to manage economic affairs. The size of the federal government began rapidly expanding in the 1930s, growing from 553,000 paid civilian employees in the late 1920s to 953,891 employees in 1939. The budget grew substantially as well. In 1939, federal receipts of the administrative budget were 5.50 percent of Gross National Product, GNP, while federal expenditures were 9.77 percent of GNP. These numbers were up significantly from 1930, when federal receipts averaged 3.80 percent of GNP while expenditures averaged 3.04 percent of GNP. Another contributor to changing the role of government in the 1930s was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR was important because of his creation of the New Deal, which was a program that would offer relief, recovery, and reform to the American nation.