The other night, on Obama-TV he shared with us his belief that we are in "the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression". Wow - that's pretty bad! Shit - what do we do now? I'll have to cancel my cable!
Matt Welch of Reason Magazine doesn't quite see it though:
I don't mean to minimize the pain here. But as Nick Gillespie pointed out a couple weeks back, "Any comparison with the Depression, which featured an unemployment rate of 25 percent and a contraction in GDP of over 33 percent at its worst moments, strains credulity."
As a confirmed apocalyptic, I continue to expect the sky to fall; but as a stat dweeb I'm just not seeing the elephant tracks. Right now, during our Worst Economic Crisis Since the Great Depression, unemployment is at 6.1 percent, inflation is at 4.9 percent, and GDP shrank 0.3 percent this quarter, though it's still up for the year. I don't see how that even begins to compete with the late-Carter, early-Reagan era, when GDP shrank in both 1980 and 1982, unemployment never dipped below 8 percent from November 1981 to January 1984, and inflation never dipped below 8 percent between September 1978 and January 1982.
One big difference between that Next Great Depression and this one: Washington, in the form of Reagan and Paul Volcker, was forcing us to swallow our medicine to whip inflation and create conditions for future growth. Nowadays the only government medicine being doled out is temporary pain relief.
Don't you just hate it when facts get in the way of a
