Great Depression

Over 35 years ago during the 1981-82 recession, Billy Joel released “Allentown” about the plight of this Pennsylvania town. 

President Trump fired the opening salvo in a trade war—reminiscent of the 1930s trade war from the Smoot-Hawley Act, which prolonged the Great Depression—when he announced he will impose tariffs of 25% and 10% on imported steel and aluminum.

John F. Kennedy campaigned for president in 1960 targeting 5% real economic growth. After he was elected, he achieved that goal, doubling the slow growth of the Eisenhower 1950s.

Heartland Senior Fellow Peter Ferrara joins the Made In America radio show with host Neal Asbury to talk about a new Heartland policy brief titled “Why the United States Has Suffered the Worst Economic Recovery Since the Great Depression.”

Beginning in 1983 the government changed its method of calculation to show lower inflation by excluding food and energy, claiming they were too volatile to be reliable indicators. The result is the so-called “core inflation” CPI, which is a favorite of the Federal Reserve. The latest figure for this CPI reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is 0.4% (for August and also July), but if calculated by the method used in 1980 the inflation rate would be 7½ percent, as shown by Shadow Government Statistics (ShadowStats.com).

On Wednesday, Georgetown Law School Professor Randy Barnett started with a lecture on the two traditional visions of the Constitution. Proponents of the well-known democratic Constitution contend rights are derived…

Forty years ago, on October 9, 1974, the Nobel Prize committee announced that the co-recipient of that year’s award for economics was the Austrian economist, Friedrich A. Hayek. Never was there a more deserving recognition for one of the truly great free market thinkers of modern times.

For more than a decade, now, Federal Reserve policy has been guided by the fear of one economic bogyman: the presumed danger of “price deflation.” The fear is unfounded and the inflationary “solution” only leads to disaster.

Instead of deregulation to reduce unnecessary, stifling regulatory burdens and barriers, as both Carter and Reagan did to such fully documented success, Obama regulates mercilessly as if regulation is cost free to the economy, as the most interventionist President in American history.

The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) is out with news of higher transit ridership. APTA President and CEO Michael Melaniphy characterizes the new figures as indicating “a fundamental shift going on in the way we move about our communities.” Others even characterized the results as indicating “shifting consumer preferences.” The data shows either view to be an exaggeration.

The full bill for Obama’s failed economic policies has yet to arrive. But no such explosion of debt has ever escaped a day of reckoning, and no such monetary surge has ever had a happy ending.

At the end of 2013, after serving five years, Barack Obama is a complete failure as President, by his own standards, as reflected in his own words.

As a longtime book reviewer, I have read a growing stack of books warning about a financial collapse, but Holland’s book is not only based in the actual debt, but is written in a manner that even a person who has no knowledge of this issue can understand.