“The official national unemployment rate stood at 25 percent, but that figure was widely considered to be low. Among non-farm workers, unemployment was more than 37 percent, and in some areas, like Toledo, Ohio, it reached 80 percent. Business investment was down 90 percent … Per capita real income was lower than three decades earlier….If you were unfortunate enough to have put your money in a bank that went bust, you were wiped out.
“With no idea whether any banks would reopen, millions of people hid their few remaining assets under their mattresses, where no one could steal them at night without a fight. The savings that many Americans had spent a lifetime accumulating were severely depleted or gone, along with 16 million of their jobs. When would they come back? Maybe never. The great British economist John Maynard Keynes was asked by a reporter the previous summer if there were any precedent for what had happened to the world’s economy. He replied yes, it lasted four hundred years and was called the Dark Ages.”
The above is how author Jonathan Alter in “The Defining Moment” describes the state of our nation on the day in 1933 that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated president of the United States. Let us count our blessings.
The nation was so desperate for leadership (some prominent sources proposed a “dictator”), FDR was able to enact many beneficial programs over the following 100 days and thus return confidence to the public. However, Barack Obama is confronted with a large portion of misguided Americans who do not understand the successes of the TARP and the Recovery and Reinvestment Act. According to a report “How a Poorer America Is Holding Back the Recovery” posted by AOL News:
“A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in late April, just when consumer spending and hiring started to wane again, found many Americans had become dubious about the effectiveness of both the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and the Recovery Act. Sixty-two percent of respondents said the economic stimulus hadn’t helped the job situation, countering several nonpartisan studies that found it did.Sponsored Li
“These perceptions and their political resonance have constrained the government’s ability to take any new stimulating action that many economists consider necessary to make a dent in unemployment, or poverty — a dynamic that could become self-perpetuating.”
When the history of the second and the third decade of the 21st century is written, partisan obstructionism may be considered the main cause for the failure of the economy to recover and subsequent radical political change. Given the spread of poverty and growing disproportionate wealth of the top one percent of the population, the stage is being set for the next Huey Long.
