Gee how unexpected.

These stats are racist. ;-)

More cherry picking.

You need to include 1929 at the least, to have a valid point of comparison. I'd include 1920 as well.

check your history mojo, 1929 is not post WWII as the chart says.

We ... must ... spend ... our ... way ... into ... prosperity.

One president got it right....not a democrat though

Recalling the forgotten depression of 1920

July 11, 2011 · 17 comments

Remember the depression that started in 1920? Unlikely, as it didn’t last long. The downturn was brief because there weren’t a bunch of “smart” people like FDR and Obama “fixing” things, just some dope named Harding who cut spending and got out of the way.
warren-g-harding

The Ludwig Von Mises Institute retrieves the story from the memory hole:

The economic situation in 1920 was grim. By that year unemployment had jumped from 4 percent to nearly 12 percent, and GNP declined 17 percent … Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover — falsely characterized as a supporter of laissez-faire economics — urged President Harding to consider an array of interventions to turn the economy around. Hoover was ignored.

Instead of “fiscal stimulus,” Harding cut the government’s budget nearly in half between 1920 and 1922. The rest of Harding’s approach was equally laissez-faire. Tax rates were slashed for all income groups. The national debt was reduced by one-third.

The Federal Reserve was reserved, cooking up none of the useless alphabet soups today’s Fed concocts with annoying regularity. The result of all this inaction?

By the late summer of 1921, signs of recovery were already visible. The following year, unemployment was back down to 6.7 percent and it was only 2.4 percent by 1923.

No stupid road signs, no Botox-addled crones screeching about “jobs”, no hi-speed trains to Whoville and no trillion dollars worth of toilet paper – just the “tired old way of doing things” Obama and his presstitutes despise.

But if Warren Harding were president, we’d all have jobs by now.

- Written by Bonfire of the Absurdities

Source: Ludwig Von Mises Institute

How apropriate its a Red line going down.

"We ... must ... spend ... our ... way ... into ... prosperity."

Let me fix that for you . . .

We ... must ... borrow ... massive ... $amounts ... so ... we... can ... pretend ... to ... spend ... our ... way ... into ... prosperity.

I think the line was "we gotta spend to avoid going bankrupt" -- Joe Biden

Someone made reference to 1929. That will be bad enough. But some people need to remember what happened after that 10 year period ended.

What was that about the words "history" and "doomed" again?

cal2 - I'm not interested in arbitrary cut-offs, I'm interested in recession/depression data, and leaving off the largest in the last century is just dumb.

If the USA winds up owing China and others trillions and trillions of dollars, doesn't that them become their problem?

I don't get who owes whom and what it REALLY means in the end. It's all ones and zeros on someone's computer in reality. I mean are there mountains of hundred dollar bills actually being printed and distributed? If so, where are they? Whose getting them ... where's the stash? it must be one big honkin' stash. I have seen demos where they pile up a trillion and reaches like half way to the moon or some such.

The Fed prints it, they loan it to the USA with an interest rate then it's sold to suckers as bonds with interest and then .... what? There ain't enough to go around or the suckers sell them back? The US government buys them back and then does what with them?

This is the economic wrangling to be found only in Libtardia.

The only think that looks real to me anymore is guns and gold.

In the US $1 trillion of business capital goes uninvested, foreign capital inflows to the US have fallen to nothing, and the only thing keeping unemployment below 11percent is retirements. The only way things can get worse is if the Vacationer-In-Chief gets a second term.

Mojo: not sure how good the data would have been pre ww2. Govt was a while lot smaller and there were no social security numbers etc to help in tracking it.

Were there such data - and going by amity schlaes book on the depression - it would have looked a lot like the current recession - some are cooling today's slump a jobs depression - in that the jobs slump has persisted and may actually have worsened of late much like the depression worsened in 1937.

Lets all hope that the current phase is not a replay of 1937. That's when hope truly was washed away and despair settled in and life got a whole lot grimmer for Americans. Sadly, judging by some of the US TV commentators reactions and emotions of late I think we may indeed already be seeing it.

Nov 2012 can't come soon enough.

Including the '29 would cloud things a lot, because the worst of it was a long time after the initial drop. It took a lot of "fixes" before the heart of the depression hit. It would look similar to the current red line though, because at the 2-year mark it still had a lot of sliding to do.

The '30s depression ended in about '39, right after the Democrats were thrown out of office in a big way in '38. So maybe we have learned something. People say the war ended the depression, and maybe selling weapons to combatants did, since we weren't in the war yet when the cycle of recessions finally ended, but I just have to note that the '38 election marked the end of these recessions.

Wow... I never expected that George Bush did so much damage to the economy by cutting taxes and raising spending.

I think I see the face of the Devil in that chart, looking down and saying, "Oh my, that really sucks."

—the percentage of young people who are working—has plunged to 45 percent. That’s the lowest level since the Labor Department began tracking the data in 1948.

data , 1948 .....mojo is a simpleton.

put in data from 1492. when everyone in N.America was officially unemployed. who cares. the chart clearly says "after WWII"

The MSM truly are ostriches. They'll stick their head in the sand and COMPLETELY ignore significant and relevant stories like this. Then they go all crazy for 'Kate's bare bum' stories like it's a shiny button.

P.S. I mean Kate Middleton, not you Kate.

Right, I'm off to the pub. I can spend my way into prosperity and drink my way into sobriety in a single, clean, integrated process.

In my view, aligning the graphs at the point of maximum job losses obscures the enormity of the problem. This version aligns the graphs at the beginning of the recession. It shows that job losses were actually more modest than in past recessions at first, the dropped precipitously and continued to fall well past the point where past recessions had turned around.

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-percent-job-losses-in-post-wwii-recessions-2011-3