Remembering the Depression

I don't and most likely neither do you, and it looks like our Administration and the two presidential candidates haven't even read a magazine article about it, let alone a history textbook or taken an economics class. Couldn't they have at least listened to their parents tell stories of the "bad old days?"

I think the older McCains were out of the country, and Obama's father and his parents were in Africa in those years, so unless his Hawaiian grandparents mentioned it to him, he probably knows nothing either. Obama's confused about money anyway and where it comes from (Biden's son was a lobbiest, Fannie, Freddie, and Hollywood have funded his campaign with bazillions and still he poor mouths about a bad economy, etc., and he never had two nickles until the Bush years, but he's had a brain freeze), so we'll give him a pass.

But I do remember this, from what my parents told me. Dad and Mom were never unemployed and they owned their own home (maybe two different ones, but I don't remember when they bought the house from my early childhood). Their college closed after a bad fire and there was no money to rebuild. There must have been scholarship money, because that's how Dad went to college. However, a college education meant nothing then; they worked in a printing plant, took in roomers, and Mom worked as a housekeeper for awhile. My maternal grandparents lost most of their wealth in the 1920s equivalent of the tech bust of the 1990s--they had over speculated in farm land during WWI. After the war ended, no one needed all those commodities and the bottom dropped out for the American farmer long before it did for Wall Street investors. Also, my grandfather was just a careless manager. Even in bad times, personal skill matters. But they still hung on to three farms through hard work.

But things didn't really go south until Franklin Roosevelt took over. The U.S. could have been spared a lot of pain and loss if the government--all of them--had acted more responsibly and infused less socialism. If you think things are a mess now, just wait until Obama tries to equalize everything.

I've been listening to the media and the Democrats hammering "this economy" since the run up to the 2004 election, so to paraphrase what I heard on a CNN special today from a reporter who belatedly has realized that just maybe her job is on the line too if the media continues to dig this hole deeper--let's all just breathe.