On Sat, 22 Oct 2011 09:11:49 -0700, Gunner Asch
wrote:

On Sat, 22 Oct 2011 11:50:58 -0400, Allen Drake
wrote:

The continued dive in the economy is simply fallout from the failure
of the previous administration. This is why the right is not serious
about winning the WH in 2012 and why they offered up who they did to
run against Obama in the first place. Any Dem could have beaten any of
your heroes on the right. Just look at who you nut jobs are putting up
for sacrifice once again. You are nothing but a joke from start to
finish Gumby. You have nothing and never did loser.

Must suck to be such a moron like you Gumby.

LAUGH LAUGH LAUGH!!! Oh...like the LAST Great Depression???

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla...sion-5409.aspx


FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists
calculate
By Meg Sullivan August 10, 2004
Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression
dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously
thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Harold L. Cole and
Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed
into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

"Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great
mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always
worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,"
said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA's Department of Economics. "We found
that a relapse isn't likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with
ill-conceived stimulus policies."

In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy,
Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures
that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.

"President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible
for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by extension
reducing employment and demand for goods and services," said Cole, also
a UCLA professor of economics. "So he came up with a recovery package
that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry
to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to
demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been,
given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery,
but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies."

Using data collected in 1929 by the Conference Board and the Bureau of
Labor Statistics, Cole and Ohanian were able to establish average wages
and prices across a range of industries just prior to the Depression. By
adjusting for annual increases in productivity, they were able to use
the 1929 benchmark to figure out what prices and wages would have been
during every year of the Depression had Roosevelt's policies not gone
into effect. They then compared those figures with actual prices and
wages as reflected in the Conference Board data.

In the three years following the implementation of Roosevelt's policies,
wages in 11 key industries averaged 25 percent higher than they
otherwise would have done, the economists calculate. But unemployment
was also 25 percent higher than it should have been, given gains in
productivity.

Meanwhile, prices across 19 industries averaged 23 percent above where
they should have been, given the state of the economy. With goods and
services that much harder for consumers to afford, demand stalled and
the gross national product floundered at 27 percent below where it
otherwise might have been.

"High wages and high prices in an economic slump run contrary to
everything we know about market forces in economic downturns," Ohanian
said. "As we've seen in the past several years, salaries and prices fall
when unemployment is high. By artificially inflating both, the New Deal
policies short-circuited the market's self-correcting forces."

The policies were contained in the National Industrial Recovery Act
(NIRA), which exempted industries from antitrust prosecution if they
agreed to enter into collective bargaining agreements that significantly
raised wages. Because protection from antitrust prosecution all but
ensured higher prices for goods and services, a wide range of industries
took the bait, Cole and Ohanian found. By 1934 more than 500 industries,
which accounted for nearly 80 percent of private, non-agricultural
employment, had entered into the collective bargaining agreements called
for under NIRA.

Cole and Ohanian calculate that NIRA and its aftermath account for 60
percent of the weak recovery. Without the policies, they contend that
the Depression would have ended in 1936 instead of the year when they
believe the slump actually ended: 1943.

Roosevelt's role in lifting the nation out of the Great Depression has
been so revered that Time magazine readers cited it in 1999 when naming
him the 20th century's second-most influential figure.

"This is exciting and valuable research," said Robert E. Lucas Jr., the
1995 Nobel Laureate in economics, and the John Dewey Distinguished
Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. "The
prevention and cure of depressions is a central mission of
macroeconomics, and if we can't understand what happened in the 1930s,
how can we be sure it won't happen again?"

NIRA's role in prolonging the Depression has not been more closely
scrutinized because the Supreme Court declared the act unconstitutional
within two years of its passage.

"Historians have assumed that the policies didn't have an impact because
they were too short-lived, but the proof is in the pudding," Ohanian
said. "We show that they really did artificially inflate wages and
prices."

Even after being deemed unconstitutional, Roosevelt's anti-competition
policies persisted — albeit under a different guise, the scholars found.
Ohanian and Cole painstakingly documented the extent to which the
Roosevelt administration looked the other way as industries once
protected by NIRA continued to engage in price-fixing practices for four
more years.

The number of antitrust cases brought by the Department of Justice fell
from an average of 12.5 cases per year during the 1920s to an average of
6.5 cases per year from 1935 to 1938, the scholars found. Collusion had
become so widespread that one Department of Interior official complained
of receiving identical bids from a protected industry (steel) on 257
different occasions between mid-1935 and mid-1936. The bids were not
only identical but also 50 percent higher than foreign steel prices.
Without competition, wholesale prices remained inflated, averaging 14
percent higher than they would have been without the troublesome
practices, the UCLA economists calculate.

NIRA's labor provisions, meanwhile, were strengthened in the National
Relations Act, signed into law in 1935. As union membership doubled, so
did labor's bargaining power, rising from 14 million strike days in 1936
to about 28 million in 1937. By 1939 wages in protected industries
remained 24 percent to 33 percent above where they should have been,
based on 1929 figures, Cole and Ohanian calculate. Unemployment
persisted. By 1939 the U.S. unemployment rate was 17.2 percent, down
somewhat from its 1933 peak of 24.9 percent but still remarkably high.
By comparison, in May 2003, the unemployment rate of 6.1 percent was the
highest in nine years.

Recovery came only after the Department of Justice dramatically stepped
up enforcement of antitrust cases nearly four-fold and organized labor
suffered a string of setbacks, the economists found.

"The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations
of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to
recover from depressions and that significant government intervention
was required to achieve good outcomes," Cole said. "Ironically, our work
shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government
not intervened."


It should be noted..that UCLA...University of California Los Angeles..is
hardly a Rightwing think thank...but a Leftwing one....


Gunner

So all you can do it ramble on about what happened so far in the past
and say nothing about how the right can change anything. Your empty
noise is noted. Post here and now what Obama did to make anything
worse other then to fight giving more tax breaks to the millionaires.

Crickets.................