Thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson. I think we’re about the same age, and I have similar memories of being told about the Depression by my parents and grandparents who lived through it. I don’t know what we’re in, but it isn’t (at least yet) a depression, though it seems as though the government is doing everything possible to get us there.
6 thoughts on “A Surreal Depression”
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It’s so bad that we can no longer afford hyperlinks.
I wonder if we’re officially ‘not in a Depression’ because the powers that be, are monkeying with the economic numbers. And most of the economists we see or hear are college professor types, most of whom are socialist stooges in love with Obamacare and Obama in general. They certainly don’t want to buck the system and SAY Obama and his minions are wrong.
The gub’ment stooges keeping the overall economic numbers numbers, that would show a Depression, are the same ones who reported this week, that unempoyment is down, even though more people applied last week than the week before. How is a number less when it’s more, by their own numbers?
Do you want them balancing your check book? I don’t want them counting my small change jar!
And they are the same ones who say there is no inflation, even though food and fuel prices are WAY up from last year, and higher still if you look back at the Monday before the last Presidential election. That’s the true issue IMHO, not saying Obama’s economic plans aren’t working. Or worse, saying he is the cause of some of the problems.
I think we ARE in a Depression, I think it will be as severe as the last one if not worse / longer, and I wonder (fear) if it will take a WWIII to get us out of it.
My personal investment plan includes rice, beans and bullets,
I listened to the stories my grandparents and parents told me about the Great Depression. One of the stories my grandfather related was about how having a tooth extracted cost $1.00 with painkillers or 50 cents without. He said he knew a lot of men who saved the 50 cents because money was so hard to come by. He was a sharecropper raising 5 kids on about $20 a month. They grew most of their own food and made their own clothes to the extent possible. Money was very tight.
I don’t think we’re anywhere close to that level – yet. I do agree that the numbers we’re hearing about inflation, unemployment and GDP are seriously questionable. Recent articles state that if we used the same formulas to calculate inflation as we used before 1980, the rate would be 10%. Likewise, the unemployment rate would be about double what we’re hearing. If the government keeps spending the way they’re going, we could well end up with a depression even deeper and longer lasting than the “great” one.
Oddly enough, I can’t remember any stories of the 1930s Depression. My family in New Jersey survived — perhaps not very prettily — but survived. They even managed to hang on to the family home. My father even graduated from Rutgers in 1935.
What’s going on today is depressing. True unemployment is higher than the numbers say. Men in construction and manufacturing are especially hard hit. 40% of people over 50 were being fired out of jobs before the current economic calamity. Most were losing everything that they had saved. Young people are entering adulthood with huge college debts. Employers — especially in tech fields — are getting away with abuses that would not have happened back in the 1950s and 1960s. The top 1% have much more wealth compared to the middle class than they did 30 years ago.
Tea party members have expressed a good deal of anger at government. What is most interesting to me at least is the recent Tea party protests against crony capitalism that benefits the few at the expense of the many.
Unemployment then was around 20%. Unemployment now as measured the old way before the BLS became the Bureau of Lies and Statistics is between 16 and 20%. John Williams of ShadowStats says 20%.
Instead of soup lines, we have 1 out of 7 on food stamps. But the real issue is perception. For every two share cropper, relocated Okie dust-bowler, etc. there were 8 who managed to have a job of some sort during the last depression. Both my grandfathers remained employed with the Post Office during the entire period, and made it ok, though my dad told stories of schoolmates who had mustard and onion sandwiches for lunch. They even had money to drive to the Worlds Fair in Chicago in the 1930’s.
The problem with calling this a depression is that the GDP is increasing and Wall Street is booming. If this was a depression both would be in the dumps.
As for unemployment, here is an interesting chart.
http://www.miseryindex.us/urbymonth.asp
Note that the current rate has not reached the level during the second year of the Reagan Administration in November and December of 1982.
The problem with unemployment is the same now as it was than, the transfer of jobs overseas and/or replacement by advancing technology, both trends being accelerated by business being forced to cut costs during the recession.
The solution now as in the 1980’s is to encourage the development of new industries to replace those moving overseas. Nothing magical, just hard work and time needed.
BTW you see a mini-example of this in the aerospace industry as the Shuttle is phased out and the entrepreneurial space firms are phased in.