The University of California at Los Angeles reports: Pro-labor policies pushed by President Herbert Hoover after the stock market crash of 1929 accounted for close to two-thirds of the drop in the nation’s gross domestic product over the two years that followed, causing what might otherwise have been a bad recession to slip into the Great Depression, a UCLA economist concludes in a new study. “These findings suggest that the recession was three times worse — at a minimum — than it would otherwise have been, because of Hoover,” said …
George Mason University economics professor Don Boudreaux offered a grim assessment of the economic stimulus package that’s making its way through Capitol Hill, questioning President Barack Obama’s contention that government must do something. “Conventional wisdom in Washington is that we must do something regardless of how wise or prudent it is,” said Boudreaux, the keynote speaker at an economic recovery event cosponsored by Heritage and the Club for Growth. “It’s taken as a matter of course that we must spend wildly.” Instead, Boudreaux said, history offers a lesson that shows …
“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.” Sound like, oh, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio or some other exasperated Republican stalwart lamenting proposals to spend our way out of the recession? Listen again: “I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises.” Sound more like a liberal Democrat pushing job creation — say, Harlem’s …
One of the great untold stories about the Depression is that there were really two of them. By the mid-1930′s the U.S. economy was well along the road to recovery with the number of unemployed dropping from 13 million in 1933 to 7.6 million in 1936. The the Supreme Court, bowing to the court packing pressure of FDR, approved the Wagner Act and the economy tanked again. The reason? National Right to Work Committee’s Mark mix explains: This measure, which is still the basis of our labor relations regime, authorized …
In his latest column, radio talk show host Tom Morgan takes us down memory lane to explain why more, not less, free trade is needed now that the economy is struggling: Some politicians propose moves that could plunge us into another Great Depression. If you think I exaggerate, take some time to read about the last one. One of the biggest mistakes that pushed us into it was when we stifled free trade with other countries. In 1930 Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. President Hoover signed it.The act was …
Today’s Free Trade Fact of the Day Cato Institute’s Center for Trade Policy Studies director Daniel Griswold who shows that the lowering of trade barriers reduces the number of recessions and their length: According to the NBER, our economy has been in recession a total of 16 months in the past 25 years, or 5.3 percent of the time. In comparison, between 1945 and 1983, the nation suffered through nine recessions totaling 96 months, or 21.1 percent of that time period.4 (See table 1.) In any given month, the country …
With politicians invoking the Great Depression to justify more government intervention in the market place, it is important to look back and remember what policies helped really helped usher in the worst decade for the US economy ever. Amity Shlaes writes at Bloomberg: Hoover knew free trade was beneficial. But his party, the Grand Old Party, was the tariff party. So in spite of himself, he signed a big new tariff, the Smoot-Hawley act, triggering retaliation from U.S. trading partners. For many decades now, Democrats have contrasted Hoover’s concession to …
