What Decade Is It?

I'm still pondering the Depression of 1920-21 and its aftermath.

It's difficult to find hard data on the peiod.  Beareau of Labor Statistics information only goes back to the 40's.

Anecdotal information from J and Tux about the 20's are consistent with the same kind of top-only "recovery" we have experience over the last decade.  For a while, I though that 2000 was a 1929 equivalent, and that the stock market rebound of the last 12 months was something like the ups and downs of the 30's.  My feeling has been that we are about to fall into the second depression leg, a la 1938.

Analogies are never perfect, but now I wonder if 2000 wasn't like 1919, and the Bush years weren't the roaring twenties, but with better record keeping.  The recent recovery, such as it was (or might it have been a sham?) was jobless.  Income and wealth disparity have continued to rise over the last decade.  That was they way in went it the 20's, but was not the main thrust of the 30's, as regulations were put into place.

Nothing in the last several years has happened to dampen my pessimism.  What is the best analogy for today?  Is it 1929 or 1937?

Or do I have this all completely wrong, and recovery is a shiny package waiting on the door step?  If this is true, please convince me so I can stop worrying about my grandchildren.

Meanwhile, idiots like John Kyl spew this kind of dreck. (Emphasis added.)

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) did not join Bunning's effort, but he defended his colleague's point of view. Kyl told the Senate he questioned why anyone would see unemployment benefits as helpful to the economy, or to the job market.


"If anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work," Kyl said. "I am sure most of them would like work and probably have tried to seek it, but you can't argue it is a job enhancer."
 
Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Center, says there's a good reason people are out of work for so long. There are six unemployed Americans for every available job, he said.

In other words, according to Kyl, unemployment is a nice cushy vacation, so why would these new welfare queens go back to work?   As Mark Thoma puts it:

Conservatives whine about everything, and the noise they make is often quite disconnected from the importance of the problem, so the mere fact that they are making noise doesn't say much. The real problem is those who refused to give the help that was needed, people like Jon Kyl. The people sitting at home jobless as a consequence of this failure, people just trying to get by until there are jobs again, are not the ones to blame.

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