The year of 1937 was the year that the New Deal chickens came home to roost. Rapid unionization courtesy of the Wagner Act was raising the cost of labor in an economy swimming in surplus labor. In the first six months of 1937 wages had risen 11 percent. In the steel industry wages went up 33 percent. And higher wages without higher output hurt company profits. Then there was the new tax on wages mandated by the Social Security Act of 1935 that employers and workers started paying in 1937. The Undistributed Profits Tax of 1936 was biting business, and companies were laying off employees. A new concern about balancing the federal budget meant cutting the federal budget from $10.5 billion to $8.6 billion and an end to the vote-buying programs like the Public Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration. The crash when it came was more severe than in 1929. The Dow Jones Industrials collapsed from 190 in August to a low of 114 on November 24. At the end of the year Harold L. Ickes asserted that sixty families who ran the nation were on strike against the rest of the country.

all years | 1929 | 1930 | 1931 | 1932 | 1933 | 1934 | 1935 | 1936 | 1937 | 1938 | 1939

1929-1939: “A Decade that will live — in stupidity.”

Why Stuck on Stupid?

Seventy years ago the leaders of both US political parties turned away from the policies that had created an economic powerhouse we call the Roaring Twenties. For ten long years Americans suffered through wrenching economic dislocations: deflation, inflation, a four-year economic contraction, endless unemployment, mindless political experiments, and ruthless attacks on businessmen for political gain as their leaders stayed Stuck on Stupid.

Today, after a twenty-five year economic boom, Americans are once more faced with a political elite that wants to monkey with success. It wants to raise tax rates. It wants to restrict trade. It wants to increase government power.

It’s time to look back and remind ourselves how it came to be, starting in 1929, that America got itself Stuck on Stupid. Otherwise it could happen again.

— Christopher Chantrill

SOURCES

UAH monthly satellite record
UAH satellite temperature record on global temperatures

Archived News Releases for Employment Situation
Monthly BLS Employment Situation Summaries

The world's 50 most powerful blogs
at least as far as the lefty Guardian is concerned.

IRS Income Tax Share Table
the rich pay the income taxes

No Freedom Without Economic Freedom
US is fifth on Economic Freedom Index this year. Is that good enough?

Liberal-Conservative Self-Identification
from 1972.

US Current Dollar and "Real" GDP (xls)
US GDP series from 1929 to present

US GDP Percent Change from Preceding Period (xls)
US GDP change from 1929 to present

US Money Supply Historical Series
money supply from 1867 to 1970; Historical Statistics of US: X. Financial Markets and Institutions: Series X-415; p.992 (pdf)

Historical US Federal Spending
Table No. HS--47. Federal Government -- Receipts and Outlays: 1900 to 2003 (xls).

US Consumer Price Index time series
Consumer Price Index from 1800 to 1970; Historical Statistics: E. Prices and Price Indexes: Series E-135; p.211 (pdf)

US Unemployment
Historical US Unemployment from 1900; Statistics and Analysis on Unemployment, Poverty, Urbanization, etc., in the United States

Money Supply and CPI in Great Depression
includes annual employment rate in 1930s

Employment Situation Summary

Compensation from before World War I through the Great Depression

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Democratic Capitalism

Three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism