Even in the worst of the Depression, the majority of people still had jobs --- I've read that joblessness was 20-30% ---- but I think ours is that now if you add unemployment in with welfare rates and SSDI rates ---- which were very low in those days. Welfare rates are over 35% in the region I'm in ---- and over 50% in some counties along the border now. That's worse than Great Depression statistics.
Fewer people could afford to buy things back then.
Stock crash aftermath, by Thomas Sowell
The fact that the first government efforts to get the country out of a depression -- by both Hoover and FDR -- were followed by the longest depression in our history has also not been lost on some. Quite aside from the specific harm done by specific programs, the general uncertainty generated by unpredictable government interventions made investors reluctant to make the long-term commitments needed to generate more jobs, more output, and more purchasing power.Not only the Federal Reserve and two presidents managed to make the Great Depression worse, so did Congress. When it passed the Hawley-Smoot tariff of 1930, it contributed to a worldwide contraction in international trade, as country after country tried to "save jobs" by protectionism.
The notion that the stock market crash of 1929 caused the Great Depression that ravaged the 1930s has long been popular on the left, since this blames capitalism and casts government in the role of rescuer of the economy. However, Professor Peter Temin of MIT has pointed out that in 1987 the "stock market fell almost exactly the same amount on almost exactly the same days of the year" -- and there was no depression.
The Reagan administration was not the New Deal. The economy kept on growing.