You know? Guys?

The Great Depression doesn't tickle your toes.

But thousand will lose (con: loose) their homes

As you laugh.

The grandma from the 30s is from:
http://www.videosift.com/video/Great-Depression-Cooking-Ep-3-The-Poorman-s-Meal

I got an error message when I actually had posted my first comment. So instead of having a duplicate message I explained what happened.

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Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

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>> ^kymbos:
Too funny, great sift and excellent show.


Funny? How about greatly depressing? So much bullshit floating around in the news. That's why I'm always hugely skeptical about items with [insert name] institute discovered [insert bogus relation]

This is very well produced but highly biased account of the use of government spending geared to appeal to pro-capitalists and libertarians in the US.

One can't look at government spending without taking into account the positive effects of the multiplier effect say in the context of recovery during the great depression, the growth of public infrastructure and provision of welfare services to the citizens. It's a tool of economic policy, one that has been used to great success in many other first world nations that have better health and economic indicators then the US.

One can't take one policy scheme and then essential lay all of a nations ills on it. Is it a problem right now for the US? yes. Is it a necessary tool considering the state of the US economy currently. yes. Rock and a hard place.

That's your opinion coming from a pro capitalistic viewpoint, almost all these industries themselves pressed for government intervention and consequentially benefited massively from protectionist policies (see big 3 auto industry case vs Japan auto industry in the 70s oil crisis), the government representatives benefit because the states where these firms are based would vote with their jobs and lively hood. So on a economic standpoint you can argue its wrong, but not from a social one, an economist would allow GM to fail but we live in a society that needs to support its workers.

Such collusion is not the fault of the government, because they way you phrase it you make it sound like its a government initiative, when in reality its the industries themselves that consistently press for protectionist policies to distort the market for their own benefits and profit. The EU farming fiasco right now taking place in France is a clear example, the agricultural sector is pressing for a return to a quota system to allow prices to rise artificially, Brussels has stated it will take no such action as right now agro prices are completely out of sync with world prices and this only benefits the minority agricultural sector.

Am sorry but your opinions fail to ever encompass reality of the situation. Rather you simply have a pro-right beef with what you call government growth, because its a buzz word of the republican right wing. You rail against taxes and government spending without ever thinking that government spending in the 40s and 50s has built up the very infrastructure right that connects America with roads and telecom systems, government subsidies in cases like Canada have allowed the sprouting of a telecom network in its early years because no profit orientated firm would ever dream to lay down telecom networks because its a cost loss.

Its just like when I watch C-SPAN and see republicans complain about stimulus and subsidy packages when i know full well their state presses for the same stimulus and subsidy packages year on year to support their state industries.

Is there hope? Yes? Does it take years? yes Smoot hawley put into effect one of the largest protectionist drives in the world post great depression it has taken 80yrs for GATT, WTO and other international incentives to return to a trade freedom that comes somewhere close to pre-1930 levels. The system of protectionism and industry subsidization takes years to unravel because industries influence government policy more then government policy influences industries.

... and if you add the Great Depression and our current depression respectively as a catalyst, it's all so very familiar.

Well, monetarism has been tested by Volker in the 80s, and as a result is not very popular nowdays. Inflation between 2 and 3% is considered ideal, and central banks of US and Europe will take measures to increase inflation if it ever falls below that value. Economy that is experiencing too low of an inflation risks stagnation, or even falling into a deflationary trap, seen during the Great Depression

I guess all the wild-lands caught fire before the fed, charcoal must of been a lot cheaper back then. Thank goodness we have the fed to manage to keep out of harms way like in Katrina and the Great Depression. Public education is one the best in the entire world, people are always talking about how we are the number 1 in the world for our education system. The problem with government is it is never big enough or in control of enough. We all know political ambitions are never corruptible, so people who make laws are always going to make better decisions than we would ourselves. It is a good thing that the feds finally stopped the smoldering ashes of the national fire that had been raging for 300 years before they existed.

>> ^marinara:
1. You can't say that doing nothing is what we got Hoover to do.

I didn't say that doing nothing is what "you" (meaning Austrian Economists, apparently) got Hoover to do. I said getting Hoover and Mellon to let banks fail, balance budgets, and adhere to the gold standard are what "you" got Hoover to do, and what Austrians are calling for Obama to do.

2. Hoover provided loan guarantees to the banks just like Obama/Bush
3. Hoover pledged public money towards building projects
4. Hoover made business leaders pledge to keep employment high
5. Hoover created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to lend money and unfreeze the credit markets.

He did all of that in 1932, and not on the scale needed. Not every ounce of what Hoover did was wrong, nor was every ounce of what Roosevelt did right.

6. Hoover made the depression worse by tinkering with interest rates and taxes.

Oddly nonspecific what you say there with "tinkering". Hoover/Mellon raised interest rates and taxes. Obama/Bernanke cut them.

There is no rule, that says you always boost the monetary supply in recessions. Is there?

Actually, that is the short-form advice of mainstream economists. There is quite a long list of exceptions to the rule, though none apply right now.

Are all economic challenges the same? No!

I'm not saying they're all the same, but there's a lot about the current economic crisis that's very similar to the Great Depression.

Why is it so hard to believe the words in this video?

Because it's internally inconsistent, and cherry-picks facts around an obvious political agenda!

Is it so hard to believe that the Fed is operating on policies that benefit the few people who actually own the Fed?

Actually, no. But not all anti-Fed propaganda is created equal. Saying "Goldman Sachs got a sweeter deal from the Fed from anyone else because they have close ties to the board of governors" I believe.

Saying "the Fed destroyed the global economy on purpose, at least twice for private gain" requires a leap from the tenuous argument that the Fed caused both depressions (I'm not sold on the Great Depression, and I vehemently disagree about today's depression), to the Fed intentionally caused both for the economic gain of some small set of people.

>> ^Psychologic:
Would slander laws be included under government censorship of free speech?
Would laws prohibiting intercourse in public places be considered a law regarding sex between consenting adults?


Yes. Though, I think it was aimed more towards gay marriage, hard to say. It also doesn't really draw a difference between levels of government. I scored 100% assuming it was all federal.

Also, your ideals there seem a bit distant from history Jigga

^1. Why weren't any dot-coms bailed out back in the day? Because they didn't have powerful lobbies. Corporate welfare encourages corporate interference in government, as some have called it, a corpocracy. Where the rich write the laws for their benefit at the cost of every other competing business. It also encourages coercion and collusion in government against the good of the people. Why do Americans pay twice as much as the rest of the world for sugar? Because sugar lobbies have successfully "protected" themselves from compeating in the world market, at the tune of 6 billion a year. There is no logical limit to bailing out one company vs another either. It is completely arbitrary. To contine with the original idea of the dot-coms, we are doing fine again even without the bail out that didn't happen. You don't need free money to make things work, in fact, it was the easy free money that make the dot-com bubble in the first place...easy money is bad money usually.

^2. You don't seem to understand exchange rates or trends in labor vs cost when it comes to trade. Either that, or you are purposefully being inflammatory, I can't figure out which. When money goes out of a country and into another, that foreign money becomes more valuable over time. In due course it becomes more costly to buy overseas goods than domestic goods, jobs that fled overseas come back. In my industry, we are seeing that happen right now; all the phone desk jobs went overseas, now jobs are coming back in droves because of the weak dollar. Some would say that because places like japan subsidies things like cars, then we should tariff them so our cars can compete. But, if the government of japan wants to buy every American part of a car, then over time the dollar will become stronger and it will not be cost effective for them to do so for long. Things shift in this model, from country to country until things more of less reach an equilibrium. Protectionism encourages those gaps that you would seek to rectify. Your heart is in the right place my friend, we just need to move your head there as well.

^3. I don't think you understand the circumstances of SS. You are trying to spin it like Bush did the war. First it was about one thing, now another. It was about weapons, now it is about freeing Iraq and terrorism. SS was about the great depression. You had peoples savings wiped out in what was arguably a government caused financial catastrophe (a failure of the fabled fed, lender of last resort who didn't lend as a last resort...oops). Once the mistake had been made, and the bank system collapsed, large portions of savings of American's were wiped out instantly. SS was created to solve this problem. So it is not that people can't and didn't save, but they did and now it is gone. If you want to spin SS, then realize that is what you are doing. But the great depression is over, and so should SS.

^4. Are you saying you don't think organizations like the red cross exist? Are you saying that you can't have a charity that isn't faith based? If that is so, then you are free to make one, like right now...this very instant. It isn't very hard now with the web, you just need gumption to go and do it...and that is the American way (Gumption I mean, not the internet...although...)!

^5. This isn't really an argument. I might as well say not cutting the budget is naive. An argument needs a real predicate, this is just an attack. You would have to show why it is naive. I could talk about why it is good, but that would be giving this non-argument more credit than it is worth.

Actually, it's pretty funny to me how he essentially says that the problem was that the Fed contracted the money supply in response to a crash. That's exactly what the Keynesian and Monetarist schools believe.

I also like how at 9:20 or so he says "the biggest gains happened when the National Recovery Act was overturned" well skippy, the National Recovery Act was trying to stop deflation by fixing prices. Not a good idea, definitely a drag on the economy, and not a part of the New Deal liberals want to repeat. He then says the "Agricultural Adjustment Act" (aka a farm subsidy bill) was struck down in 1936, and boom, growth immediately falls off (according to the chart), though his narrative blames that on the institution of the NLRA, which still exists today, and just protects the rights of workers to organize Unions.

What really cause the fall off was that Roosevelt was persuaded to believe that the depression was over, and it was time to cut spending, raise taxes, and balance the budget. Doing so immediately sent the economy crashing down again.

He also uses some voodoo to leave you thinking that because Obama thinks fiscal stimulus will help (and it did, even this video states that the economy recovered when the giant government stimulus of WWII began), he will somehow order the Fed to contract the money supply too. One, he can't, and two, we learned our lesson -- you need to expand the money supply in downturns, otherwise it chokes off the recovery. Bernanke is expanding the money supply.

He also defiantly ends with "it was not the free market and the gold standard that caused the problem", he's half right. With regard to the Great Depression, they were contracting money supply to get back onto the gold standard, and refusing to bail out the banks, which made a recession into a depression (not the free market). This economic problem was caused by the free market, and but Austrians cry out for a return to the gold standard, and that we let the banks fail.

We did it the classical/Austrian way in the 1930's, and it caused the Great Depression. Now you want us to do the same things you wanted (and got) Hoover to do, and got Roosevelt to do in 1937. Forget it.

Feds creation was in 1913, the great depression was in the 30s. There was no smiler event in scale or scope related to monetary policy prior to the fed; top notch job those guys are doing. I am not implying causality, just the prevention that you mentioned also does not exist.

>> ^detheter:
Okay, you win Fox News. See you later America, once you're bankrupt and in the waning days of your superpower status. Better start learning chinese! seriously, listen to these guys, and one day we all will be communist (chinese).


I have already learned Chinese. Married to one.

But on the topic, they can probably run this through through the regulation of commerce clause, like they do with everything these days (because everything ultimately relates to commerce... somehow).

>>GeeSussFreak:
"The only reason they existed was because of the Great Depression, it was one of the spending programs enacted by the government to try and enable Keynesian full employment (if the private sector can't employ everyone, then it is up to the government to do so)."

100 years ago Keynes (and Keynesians) claimed that in 100 years economic depressions will have been solved. Isn't that reassuring?