Re: its hard to sustain bubbles without demand(demand is driven by

D&*$?%n wrote:
> Beam Me Up Scotty wrote:
>> Then add the fact that in 1937 the unemployment was still 16% and you
>> see post 1937 was at 18% and then a recession in the depression ended
>> and took a few years to get GDP above the median. And GDP was still
>> being stolen from the private sector at rates near 90% tax rates.
>>
>> The recovery we despite government *not* because of government.

> Your data is not adequate. Typical of an urbanite to not even see the
> effect of the dust bowl. Which kicked farmers and their families off the
> land, creating most of the ‘unemployment’ you refer to. FDR didnt cause
> the weather problem.

Those were a loss of small businesses….. A farm isn’t a “job” some
people who worked on farms had a job. Back then they were family farms,
and not corporate farms. The data did include all that but it didn’t
single it out or highlight it.

I lived in the Midwest(owned acreage 15miles from the nearest small town
raised crops and animals) for a time and while I didn’t bring out the
Dust Bowl “drought” I know it was another challenge. When the drought
ended, the economy improved so we are back to FDR *NOT* being the
solution to the Great Depression but WWII and the end of the drought
ended the Depression. FDR may have helped some people live better while
the economy was negative but that doesn’t equate to repairing the
economy and ending the depression.

> Steinbeck’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ begins with the farm family, you see
> at the dinner table. Several men who were, as we now say, ‘unemployed’
> because of factors that had nothing to do with FDR. Partly, it was
> because of the weather, but partly also, by the time of this generation,
> a few after the original Pioneers, all the good land had been taken. You
> may recall Cooper referring to bottom land. But you cant farm the upland
> benches and tops for more than a couple generations before the thinner
> soil is worn out, and by the 1930′s, in most places, it was.

I worked the soil at the top of a hill(Missouri)… the soil was bad and
mostly it was used for raising hay and grazing cattle. Fields of hay
everywhere and everyone has a dairy or beef(some Bison they were cool)
or a mix and a vegetable garden, some had Turkey barns…. Most
everyone had some chickens.

> This wasnt FDR’s fault, and no politician at the time realized it was
> going on. Agrarian experts didnt pick up on it till decades later. But
> at the time, agriculture employed several times what it does now
> relative to the total population. The dust bowl and worn out marginal

It was also isolated to the Midwest, the east and west were still
farming, in fact people left the drought for California to work as
pickers and any other job. The North east like NJ(the garden state)
still had farms.

The Dust Bowl was more of a human tragedy than an economic tragedy, it
caused migration but most farmers owed money and weren’t rich and didn’t
lose that much.

> land created the unemployment, not liberal economic policy; altho it
> took liberal economic policy to prevent desperate people from fomenting
> a revolution, a point you also seem to ignore.

You are exaggerating the Dust Bowl’s contributions.
It was important but….. we need not make more of it than need be.

> I was born on a farm in 1939, in the upstairs hall because the place was
> still so full of kin who’d come back to the land after loosing urban
> jobs. My kin were lucky, the land was fertile, and grandpa just plowed
> up a couple more acres for garden so everyone got to eat. But a few
> hundred miles west, from the Dakotas all the way to Texas, that didnt
> work, and all those people showed up on the welfare/unemployment rolls.

True enough and as I said, that was a good thing but while big in your
life, the Dust Bowl wasn’t big in NJ GA CA WA VA NC. The Dust Bowl
could happen again, what is the contingency plans that FDR or even Bush
has in place to deal with it? Must not be a huge problem if no one in
the Federal government is trying to solve it. So it wasn’t that big a deal.

–