[familyop]

"Obviously the Bush blunder was a "teachable moment" that doesn't require going all the way back to Smoot-Hawley."

President Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Bill in June of 1930, BTW.

Compensation from before World War I through the Great Depression

by Robert VanGiezen and Albert E. Schwenk
Bureau of Labor Statistics

John T. Dunlop and Walter Galenson, eds., Labor in the Twentieth Century (New York, Academic Press, 1978), p. 30.

Dunlop and Galenson, p. 27.

Year	Unemployment rate
1923-29	3.3
1930	8.9
1931	15.9
1932	23.6
1933	24.9
1934	21.7
1935	20.1
1936	17.0
1937	14.3
1938	19.0
1939	17.2
1940	14.6
1941	9.9
1942	4.7

[NonValueAdded]

And a nuclear world war will not do for Obama what WWII did for Roosevelt in 1941.

[Oatka]

Looks like we’re close to the ‘30 level. Hopefully it won’t take another 10-11 years to get back to “normal”.

[richardtavor]

The actual unemployment rate at present is 13.9%, as measured by the U-6, Bureau of Labor statistics—this was the measure used during the Depression. It includes everyone in the official unemployment rate plus ‘marginally attached workers,’ who are neither working nor looking for work but say they want a job and have looked for work recently, and people who are employed part-time for economic reasons — they want and are available for full-time work but took a part-time schedule because that’s all they could get. We could get to 33% unemployment under this definition in a hurry. I just pray that the unintended consequences of the pig trough spendulus package won’t be as severe as they look to be.