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Debate on HR 4213 Remarks by Representative Tom McClintock House Chamber, Washington, D.C. July 22, 2010 M. Speaker: Anyone who has experienced firsthand the quiet panic that stalks every waking hour of an unemployed family knows how frightening and debilitating is chronic unemployment. You watch your savings evaporate, you see your children going without the material things their friends enjoy, and you count down the months or even weeks until you won’t be able to make that crucial rent or house payment. That unemployment check is a lifeline in such times, and I fully appreciate and understand how desperately an...

Want to be invited to A-list parties? Want people to think you are smart? Then don't smile and don't say anything positive--especially about the economy. Pessimism has become so pervasive that people will believe just about anything, as long as it is negative. Over the July 4 weekend, after a jobs report that showed 83,000 new private-sector jobs were created in June, the Drudge Report had not one but two headlines that compared the U.S. economy of 2010 to that of 1932. In other words, the U.S. is back in Depression. This is a complete overreaction and is indicative of...

Since the administration is in the process of trying to "jump-start" the economy with deficit spending, it is useful to review how the policies of FDR actually worked out in terms of economic performance in the 1930s.  The New Deal was not specifically a "Keynesian" program, in part because Keynes' magnum opus, The General Theory, was not published until 1936. However, the New Deal is regarded by Keynesians as the ur-program of government stimulus of the economy. This chart shows what happened to GNP during the New Deal.  Its time scale, as is true for all the charts in this...

The debate over free trade is riddled with myth after myth. One that keeps resurfacing, no matter how many times it is discredited, is the idea that protectionism caused the Great Depression. One occasionally even hears that this same protectionism -- specifically, the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 -- was responsible in significant part for World War Two! This is nonsense dreamed up for propaganda purposes by free traders, and it can easily be debunked. Let's start by reminding ourselves of a basic fact: The Depression's cause was monetary. The Federal Reserve had allowed the money supply to balloon excessively during the...

Marc Faber on the Coming Economic Catastrophe Triggered by the Next AIG to Fall Economics / Great Depression II May 31, 2010 - 03:34 AM By: Videos Presented by Marc Faber at "Austrian Economics and the Financial Markets," the Mises Circle in Manhattan in New York, New York. Includes an introduction by Mises Institute president Douglas E. French. We ain' t seen nothing' yet, says Marc Faber. Marc Faber, the only guy who can tell a room full of people that they are doomed and receive a standing ovation.[snip]Click to the site of the article to see the video.

* This list isn't extensive by any means, so please add more items/tips as they come to mind. Guns & ammo are a given the "list" failed to mention. I guess in order not to cause panic... Today, millions of Americans say that they believe that the United States is on the verge of a major economic collapse and will soon be entering another Great Depression. But only a small percentage of those same people are prepared for that to happen. The sad truth is that the vast majority of Americans would last little more than a month on what...

The Great Depression did not have too many silver linings, but it did change the way Americans thought about education, clearly for the better. In 1930, only 30 percent of teenagers graduated from high school. By 1940, after a decade in which there often was nothing better to do than stay in school, the number had jumped to 50 percent. The Depression didn’t just make Americans tougher. It made them smarter. In the years that followed, these newly skilled workers helped create an economic colossus. They were the factory workers, office clerks and managers who built up General Motors, U.S....

Students of economics know that the Great Depression was not caused by stock market speculation or free market excesses it was caused by the severely protectionist legislation of the Hoover Administration manifested in the Smoot Hawley tariff. Hoover, despite objections from over 1,000 economists and hundreds of corporate executives, encouraged the lawmakers to pass the legislation. Smoot Hawley was a knee jerk response to a troubled U.S. economy, troubled in part because of economic policies put in place by Hoover. In short Smoot Hawley was the wrong legislation for the wrong reason at exactly the wrong time. Herbert Hoover was...

Why Should You Be Freaked Out About Greece? Remember, The Great Depression Had Two Parts Megan McArdle | Apr. 28, 2010, 4:37 PM | 4,190 | comment 13 The most terrifying words I've seen written so far about the growing crisis in Greece were penned by Yves Smith yesterday: "So the whole idea that the financial crisis was over is being called into doubt. Recall that the Great Depression nadir was the sovereign debt default phase. And the EU's erratic responses (obvious hesitancy followed by finesses rather than decisive responses) is going to prove even more detrimental as the Club...

Panelist Robert S. McElvaine, who is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts & Letters and chair of the department of history at Millsaps College, focused on the argument – made, he said, by many conservatives today – that the failure of the New Deal to end the Great Depression shows that government spending isn’t the way to revive a slumping economy. “The most important thing to realize,” said McElvaine, “is that so-called conservatives – I prefer to call them ‘regressives’ ” – have long been trying to “restore the conditions that created the Great Depression in the first place.” “These are...

The debate over free trade is riddled with myth after myth. One that keeps resurfacing, no matter how many times it is discredited, is the idea that protectionism caused the Great Depression. One occasionally even hears that this same protectionism -- specifically, the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 -- was responsible in significant part for World War Two! This is nonsense dreamed up for propaganda purposes by free traders, and it can easily be debunked. Let's start by reminding ourselves of a basic fact: The Depression's cause was monetary. The Federal Reserve had allowed the money supply to balloon excessively during...

Robert Barro is a professor of economics at Harvard, and a commentator for The Wall Street Journal and Business Week. His critique of the Obama stimulus package provoked a sharp attack from Paul Krugman in The New York Times, which brought a spirited response from Barro. Basing his arguments on his empirical work, Barro takes issue with some common assumptions about the Great Depression, and how America got out of it.

Stimulating History James F. Davis, March 8, 2010 To be able to critically analyze economic probabilities, one needs to know the history of previous similar situations. For the first 125 years of our county we had no Federal Reserve Bank, no permanent personal income tax and no massive government stimulus spending. We also had virtually no inflation and the average economic downturn lasted only 10 months. In late 1913 the Federal Reserve Bank (FED) was created. It made it possible for the government to create money out of thin air. Also a permanent income tax was passed. From 1915 to...

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years. "Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10-...

Is the Great Depression 2.0 on the way and could it last until 2032? The Return of the Great Depression explains why the author, Vox Day, believes that the economic downturn happening in the United States will get worse before it gets better.

Calvin Coolidge spent the majority of his life in politics. He was unrepentant in his commitment to individual liberty as espoused by the Constitution. Which meant he understood the value of government getting out of the way of private enterprise. Of allowing individuals to pursue their dreams without undue interference from the government. Coolidge understood that business and, therefore, America prospered when citizens knew what to expect from government. So his first determination was the politicians version of the Hippocratic oath to "do no harm," to keep government from meddling with the private sector. His second was, when things were...

Do yourself a favor and get a copy of Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man, A New History of the Great Depression. Barack Obama's presidency and his economic policies are placed in context once you read Shlaes' account of FDR and his policies. Written in 2007, there is no way Shlaes could have manipulated the similarities. Consider this account of the Roosevelt Administration in 1937, four and a half years after the New Deal was introduced and the economy refused to budge. She refers to this time as "a depression within the Depression. " "...the Economist would conclude...that the United States...

Do yourself a favor and get a copy of Amity Shales' The Forgotten Man, A New History of the Great Depression. Barack Obama's presidency and his economic policies are placed in context once you read Shales' account of FDR and his policies. Written in 2007, there is no way Shales could have manipulated the similarities. Consider this account of the Roosevelt Administration in 1937, four and a half years after the New Deal was introduced and the economy refused to budge. She refers to this time as "a depression within the Depression. " "...the Economist would conclude...that the United States...

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The story of the Great Depression is often told in pictures: while few people recognize the names "Smoot-Hawley" or "Schechter Poultry," photographs of bank runs and bread lines continue to pack a punch, almost 80 years after they were first snapped. But the Great Depression's position as our absolute standard for economic disaster carries an unintended consequence: The power of its images seem to overwhelm -- and minimize -- the economic troubles of our own time. After all, if it doesn't look like a Depression, how tough could things be? The problem is that Walker Evans' and Dorothea Lange's famous...