Sometimes secretly means that enough critical mass does not know about something, or it is not discussed in depth to reveal what it means. Forbidding of physical gold ownership could not be secret, could it? since they're calling everyone to bring their gold in. But its repercussion was not immediately obvious. Let's no forget it's 1933s, there's no twitter nor blogs.
Leaving gold standard is one of the big controversies for any nation as it allows governments to inflate the supply of the money and deflate its value. Essentially that's what happened eventually. Inflation is a silent tax on the citizens.
Despite what you may have been told by others or simply be assuming because of your political convictions, there was no significant inflation in the United States in the 1930s. The decade was in fact characterized by overall deflation, with prices lower at the end of the decade than they were at the start.
Abandoning the gold standard was a crucial and positive factor in stopping deflation during a time when it was wreaking wholesale and unprecedented destruction on the American and global economy. The move was entirely necessary, and did not lead to inflation as you can hopefully see from the actual historical data:
The federal budget did turn expansionary (until 1937 when Roosevelt slowed spending in the face of evidence suggesting a mild recovery was underway), but the overall increase in federal spending under the New Deal was offset by shrinking state budgets and a series of bank failures across the interior which shrank the money supply. Look at the E. Cary Brown essay "Fiscal Policy in the Thirties" for the aggregate budget stats across the entire United States. Or just look at the inflation stats -- are they consistent with a story of unfettered government spending?
I am not sure I understand you correctly. Abandoning gold standard is one thing, abusing money after abandoning gold standard is another. When governments need money they can create it out of thin air, and leaving a standard that you can not control gives you this ability. Check the following web site.
The link you provided (http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/) calculated me the following: an item worth $20 in 1933 would cost $469.02 in 2013 and cumulative rate of inflation is 2245.1%. How is that not an inflation?
In moderate amounts inflation is healthy: it keeps unemployment down while inducing asset holders to invest in productive forms of growth. This is why most central banks try to keep the inflation rate above one percent, and in cases where monetary authorities have tried to push it lower (Canada in the mid-1990s) economic growth has suffered and unemployment has gone up.
Realistically, if you want to talk about hidden taxes on society, the costs of unemployment trump those of low inflation: in addition to affecting the most vulnerable members of society in a disproportionate way, unemployment makes everyone worse off over time because stagnant economies suffer compound losses to growth potential. This is one reason the US Fed has a dual mandate to both currency stability as well as low unemployment.
And just look at the numbers. Over the time period you mention (your stats are actually 1913-2013 not 1933-2013), American GDP grew from 39.1 billion to 56.4 billion in the 1913-1933 period where American was on the gold standard, before soaring to 14.5 trillion afterwards. Even adjusting for inflation and population growth, you have a story where the benefits of growth vastly outweighed the costs of the inflation which played a role in delivering it. And it isn't even as if you don't have inflation under the gold standard either (it is just that currency debasement happens through the private sector -- theft rather than a tax).
There is still very much an open question of what policies best keep economies balanced in the "sweet spot" between unemployment and high inflation. Unfortunately for goldbugs, while central banks are comparing things like "inflation targeting" or "GDP targeting" as general approaches, economic history clearly shows that economic growth has been far faster and more stable in the last forty years under fiat systems with independent monetary authorities than we saw in the heyday of the gold standard. So accusing Bloomberg of running a propaganda piece (parent poster) is wrong.
Leaving gold standard is one of the big controversies for any nation as it allows governments to inflate the supply of the money and deflate its value. Essentially that's what happened eventually. Inflation is a silent tax on the citizens.