Sawz, you can quote armchair and ivory tower economists until hell freezes over, but I'm a fairly old geezer and I was there at the time. Yes, I was a kid, and there was a lot going on around me that I didn't understand, but there was a lot I did understand, and understood even better later on.

I do know that a lot of people—friends of the family, relatives, neighbors—were out of work, including my father. The WPA (Works Projects Administration) put a lot of those people to work building roads, bridges, and infrastructure in general (which we are still using today), including my father, who was supporting a wife and three kids. That "pick and shovel" job that my father was able to get because of the WPA paid the rent and fed the family. Like I say, I was there. The CCC (The Civilian Conservation Corp, another New Deal program) put a lot of college age people with no job prospects to work developing national and local parks (which we are still enjoying today) and allowed them to earn enough money to go on to college if they chose to.

I remember a lot of Republicans were pissing and moaning about Roosevelt "wasting money on these 'make work' programs," but these programs did make work for a large segment of the people who, otherwise, would be standing in bread lines. 25% unemployment, until Roosevelt's New Deal programs kicked in.

What was "reducing employment and demand for goods and services" was that those millions of unemployed didn't have any money to buy goods and services with. Once people had money to spend as a result of Roosevelt's New Deal programs, the economy started to pick up again, factories started hiring, and the Depression slid into the annals of history.

Simple common sense!

Until Reagan and the Right Wing-nuts thought it would be nice to renew it by turning the foxes loose again and put the regulatory agencies that Roosevelt instituted, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, in the Dumpster by allowing it and similar agencies to staff themselves with the very people they were supposed to oversee and regulate.

The idea that "the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years" is simply not true, as anyone old enough to remember or who has studied a bit of recent history, knows. Look up what happened when, and then do the arithmetic. Fifteen years? No way! Look it up in reliable sources, don't just take Rush Limbaugh's word for it.

Or Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian. Professorships notwithstanding, they are generally regarded by other economist as the Right-Wing Beavis and Butthead of economic theory

Here, Sawz, let me help. Read THIS.

Don Firth