People are saying that because of the lessons learned during the Great Depression, it has been necessary to maul the American people to give trillions to incompetent bankers.
As anybody who knows me is aware, I'm not a big fan of the Bush / Obama bailouts to "save" our economy.
If this is what the economy looks like when it is "saved", I am left to wonder: what do these clowns think a bad economy looks like?
Comparisons to the Great Depression are ridiculous, though. Anybody who disagrees would have to answer one question before I'll listen to them: Do they sincerely believe that the Great Depression would have been averted if we gave 1 year loans to less than a dozen banks (a few of whom only recently became banks so they could be in line for big piles of government money), bought an insurance company, and allowed banks to borrow money at zero percent?
Of course not. This was never "Son of the Great Depression". Paulson and Giethner just played it up like that so they could steal the maximum amount of taxpayer money to give to bankers.
We ARE facing an economic problem, and there ARE some solutions in the great depression. Unfortunately, the Bush and Obama administration learned NONE of those lessons.
For instance, in the Great Depression, bankers leaped out of windows because they were ruined. In the Great Recession, they made the government cash hundreds of millions of dollars of bonus checks for them.
Which means that back then, bankers had an incentive to fix things. Industrialists all over America pledged their entire fortunes to trying to fight the depression. There was simply no way to sit on your pile of gold and watch others suffer. Everybody was in it together.
Today, they couldn't care less. They're doing great. What's your problem?
In the Great Depression, they took millions of Americans and gave them jobs producing public works that served as a foundation for prosperity for nearly a century. This gave people dignity. It gave folks good work habits. It gave folks pride. It gave them a leg-up, not a hand-out. It also gave us roads and parks and huge WPA buildings that are still standing today.
In the Great Recession, they decided the best thing to do is to pay people to stay at home... for 2 years... without working at all.
In the Great Depression, the consequences of the economic catastrophe were felt at all socioeconomic levels.
In the Great Recession, the government is making sure that only middle class and poor people suffer.
In the Great Depression, the government ensured that banks continued to lend and invest.
In the Great Recession, the government gives banks money at no cost, ensuring that banks don't have to do any actual banking in order to reap record profits.
Economists still aren't sure that any of the government programs enacted during the Great Depression helped at all. There's just as much evidence that the natural business cycle merely took a long time to recover, or that World War II, not government stimulus, is what brought the world out of the global depression.
The biggest difference, though? Back then, the government wasn't engaged in acts that were clearly morally wrong. Enhancing the financial fortunes of the very people who caused the problem? Paying people to do nothing? Setting up a "recovery" whose only real facet is the availability of free money that ensures the continued prosperity of banks, meanwhile removing any incentive that banks do anything that benefits anyone other than themselves?
If there is a way to mismanage this crisis any more than they're already doing, I'd like to see it. I fear that we are stuck with the two least capable presidents in US history at a time when it would have been nice to see somebody with some ability.
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