“Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial Depression Breadline” — A sculpture showing a Great Depression era breadline at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, DC. Artist: George Segal. Photo by John Cardamone, Unsplash
“Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial Depression Breadline” — A sculpture showing a Great Depression era breadline at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, DC. Artist: George Segal. Photo by John Cardamone, Unsplash
We are approaching the century mark of the start of the Great Depression. Maybe it is time to resurrect the lessons we learned from it and recognize how far things have strayed from them.
Sometimes reading tea leaves can be useful, especially when they are tea leaves already etched in history. In the 1920’s America was riding high on a booming stock market and the rich were getting richer every day.
We all know the narrative of what happened on October 29, 1929. The stock market crash of that day, also known as Black Tuesday, was not a singular event. It had been preceded by a smaller crash on October 24. These events triggered the years of economic disaster known still as the Great Depression.
The resultant rise of mass unemployment is seen as a result of the crash, although the crash is by no means the sole event that contributed to the depression. The Wall Street Crash is usually seen as having the greatest impact on the events that followed and therefore is widely regarded as signaling the downward economic slide that initiated the Great Depression. True or not, the consequences were dire for almost everybody. Most academic experts agree on one aspect of the crash: It wiped out billions of dollars of wealth in one day, and this immediately depressed consumer buying.
But the United States was not the only country affected. The Great Depression was an international phenomenon which was devastating in varying ways depending on the country involved. In Germany the net result was the rise of Hitler and Nazism, and we know where that led.
The United States eventually recovered. Various protections for society were put in place. One was the 1933 Banking Act also known as Glass-Steagall. This act established the FDIC to protect depositors and put strict limits on speculative investments by banks. This period also saw the rise of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal—a pact of laws benefiting everyday Americans and still hated by big business to this day.
Glass-Steagall worked. That is up until the day that Bill Clinton signed into law its repeal—to prove to everyone that Democrats could be “pro-business”—which lead later to the 2008 financial crash.
I’m not going to examine every action of Republicans and Democrats since that time. History already has shown us that Republicans generally have degraded our economic conditions and raised deficits while Democrats have improved them and lowered or even erased deficits.
But looking to our current situation, the storm clouds of economic disaster are taking on a kind of tornadic aspect. The swirl of scandal accompanied by blatant, broad-daylight corruption, discrimination and wholesale degradation of predictability are the rule of the day.
Our “Dear Leader”—as he is seen by his mouthpieces—has set no example of financial prudence or discipline in his entire life—yet he is somehow regarded as a “successful businessman.” The fact that Trump thinks getting paid for having his name on things equates to being productive should be all we need to know about his actual financial acumen. Anyone who can successfully bankrupt casinos can also ruin any other financial structure he gets involved in, and so it is with our economy.
Trump’s next target is the social safety net put in place under Roosevelt. He has proposed a budget which includes $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon “paid for” by cuts to social services “we can’t afford.” The truth of the matter is we can afford them and have always been able to. The lie here, perpetuated by Republicans for decades, is that people are liabilities if they cost society money. Never mind that Social Security and Medicare have already been paid for—by us. Never mind that the $4.5 trillion paid for healthcare in 2024 would have been less than $3 trillion if universal healthcare had been put in place. Elementary arithmetic tells us that $1.5 trillion in profit dollars went to healthcare corporations just in the year 2024. And those prices, like every other price under Trump, are going up.
In the meantime, Trump illegally sucked about $160 billion out of our pockets with his “Liberation Day” tariffs. He’s pardoned countless criminals and drug dealers who preyed on society. He’s taken money for Venezuelan oil and placed it in accounts he controls. And now we have a war, one that he started personally, for which he is demanding an additional $200 billion from Congress. Oh, and let’s not forget his $10 billion civil suit against his own DOJ for offending him with (correct) accusations of trying to stage a coup on Jan 6.
You can only take so much money out of an organization before it collapses. The same is true of a government. The United States is not a business intended to turn a profit, no matter what Trump’s Republican fan club claims. But the fact of the matter is that it is tax money paid in by us that he is demanding to steal for himself.
You can only stretch a rubber band so far before it snaps. And the elasticity of the American economy is already being stretched past any conceivable breaking point. This is being papered over by various means including fake statistics, like employment. Remember that Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for being honest. Employment numbers for March actually looked encouraging. Just wait. In a few weeks they will be revised downward. Just like previous reporting periods.
The actual bill for this twisted financial picture will be coming due. Trump won’t pay it, something he has proven for decades.
Criminals are in charge in the White House, lead by a convicted felon. Haven’t we yet had enough of his high crimes and misdemeanors?
Congress should ignore Trump’s upcoming budget and do its proper job of impeaching this massive threat to our Constitution and our economy. That’s the only way to avoid the Great Depression 2.0.
Marty Kassowitz is co-founder of Factkeepers. As founder of Interest Factory and View360, he brings more than 30 years experience in effective online communications, social media management, and platform development to the site. He is a writer, designer, editor and long time observer of the ill-logic demonstrated by too many members of the species known as Mankind. After a long history of somewhat private commentary on a subject he totally hates: politics, Marty was encouraged to build this site and put up his own analyses as well as curate relevant content from other sources.
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