The 2nd Great Depression

[Eric the Green]

(05-28-2020, 10:35 AM)Mickey123 Wrote: The unemployment rate in the U.S. is now at its highest level since the Great Depression.  It's somewhere in the neighborhood of 25% by this point.

And there is no end in sight for any of this.  Nothing can return to normal while the virus still spreads, and it isn't going to stop until we have a vaccine, which is 6 months or a year or two away (or possibly even never).  By the time the virus is behind us and we can try to return to normal, we're going to find that we can't.

It's easy to drop a glass on the floor and shatter it, and vastly more difficult to somehow put all the pieces back together.  Once you have enough people out of work, and enough people who've lost confidence in the economy and who have stopped spending and are saving everything, how do you reverse this?  People aren't spending, businesses aren't hiring because they don't have the sales to support new hires, large numbers of people are out of work and have no jobs they could possibly get.  With so many people not working and not producing anything, society is much poorer than it was.

The government, which is tasked with fixing all this, is much poorer than it was, as its tax revenue is considerably lower than it once was.  It doesn't have the money to just hire 25% of the population and pay them all to do who knows what.

The last Great Depression didn't end until World War II.  When will this one end?

Bernie was right; unless we realize that we need to tax and spend again, the government won't be able to hire 300,000 contact tracers and test-givers, and infrastructure building and other enterprises that are not geared toward marketing for a profit. I doubt, given how easily the boomer Democrats deserted Bernie, that we are willing to see the need for this yet. The only other way to finance a recovery is for the USA to give out gobs more loans, and hope enough people will buy bonds.

My prediction continues to be that, one way or another, the early 20s will see an uptick of needed reforms, and this will swell toward more drastic changes (and resistance to them) as the crisis climaxes in the late 20s. But victory will come much more easily than in the 1860s. And there will be foreign trouble to deal with at the same time. Lots of irons on the fire. But since reforms and changes will be made to rein in the market system, reinstate taxes and regulations on the wealthy and corporate powers, subsidize the new green energy systems that we need, and institute democratic reforms that are so needed, I think boom times could actually return by 2023 or 24 (or more pessimistically 2025, depending of course on how soon the loony Republicans are expelled from power).