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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: craig crawford who wrote (21428)	3/15/2002 8:06:12 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

There are no reliable unemployment statistics for the United States as a whole prior to 1929. No federal agency was collecting unemployment statistics in the United States before then. Any statistics before then are either estimates, or based on an industry which collected statistics within that industry (who knows how reliably?), or within a state. My recollection is that unemployment in the coal mines and iron mines during the Great Depression of the 1890s reached around 40%. I have a very vague recollection that there was one industry that was around 80% but I'd have to go find the book at the George Mason university library again. As for the unemployment rate during the Great Depression of the 1930's, that depends on the country and the industry. The worst rate I've seen so far was in Germany, in the building trades (trade union members collecting unemployment benefits from unions) - 81% in the winter of 1932. Therefore, I am not aware of any historian who would care to assert, without qualification, which depression was the worst. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I am also not aware of any historian or economist (trained historian or economist as opposed to a writer with an interest in the field) who would care to assert that either Fordney-McCumber or Smoot-Hawley "caused" the Great Depression. These days the consensus is that both the Great Depression of the 1890s and the Great Depression of the 1930s were caused primarily by deflation of the money supply caused by going back on gold - after the Civil War, and after World War I. It is, however, an ineluctable fact that tariffs make goods more expensive. The beneficiaries are not consumers, but producers, and the government. It is a form of corporate welfare. The tariffs collected go into the general treasury, so they are a form of tax, but the administration costs are not free. Is it wise to make goods more expensive during recessions? I think the general consensus among historians and economists is no - but governments have an unfortunate tendency to raise taxes during recessions. It's sort of a reflex action.