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We had periodic depressions. We had one in 1921. Teh government did nothing. it was over in a year to a year and a half.

Policies like Smoot-Hawley (and the New Deal) made a normal depression into The Great Depression — longer and deeper than it ever would have been otherwise.

(A lesson the Bush Administration should have learned.)

Your not listening. De program yourself. Smoot - Hawley had no effect on the GD. So stop it. You've been brainwashed. Look at the data yourself. This is mythology created before the internet made debunking "common knowledge" so easy. It will take you 5 minutes to see that trade was minuscule part of the US economy in 1930's America. So if Smoot Hawley took away ALL trade only 4% of the GDP would be lost. GDP went down 50% in the first few years of the GD, trade(4% of GDP) wasn't even an after thought.

>We had periodic depressions. We had one in 1921. Teh government did nothing. it was over in a year to a year and a half.

In 1921 the president cut the federal budget in half and discharged a huge amount of the debt. Depressions are a function of debt overloads and discharging debt fixes them.

>Policies like Smoot-Hawley (and the New Deal) made a normal depression into The Great Depression — longer and deeper than it ever would have been otherwise.

Smoot-Hawley was designed to help farmers but was ineffectual because we were running a trade surplus at the time. Today we run massive trade deficits and tariffs are the correct solution to the off shoring of American industry because tariffs were how we built our massive industrial powerhouse in the first place.

The main cause of the long depression was states passing laws preventing the discharge of bad debts. We went right back into that depression in 1946 until states and the feds ended the new deal and resumed normal bankruptcy proceedings.

Germany was hit by the great depression and enacted even more draconian trade restrictions but also discharged everyone’s debts and put an end to usury. Germany came out of the great depression in under a year.

Debt bubbles and depressions have been observed as far back as the Sumerians who invented compounding interest. The solution they found was discharge all debts when a new king came to power. We’re fortunate to have a Constitution that enshrined bankruptcy as a normal part of life which has made the resolution of depressions quite simple until we started trying to stop debt bubbles from popping in the 1930s.