This economic stimulus “plan” the government is rushing into looks reasonable on paper. Creating jobs will bring on a flush of consumerism once more, and the economy will have a chance to stabilize and then slowly climb out of the mini-depression. On paper.

During the 1930’s, we had a similar situation with the Great Depression, the biggest difference in then and now is the number of affected people. In 1930, there were nearly 123 million people living in the United States. In 2006, the population had ballooned to more than 300 million. The increase has been just as dramatic worldwide. Then as now, the US elected a president whom they thought had the best chance of leading them out of the economic woes. Some of the same type public works projects that were put in place then are again being considered. The problem is, all that money thrown at the depression didn’t fix the problem and lead the US into economic prosperity. It took a world war at a cost of many millions of lives and countless billions of dollars to finally snowball the economic recovery. Not to say the public works programs did not work, but there is never enough of them and the private sector will not do business at a tiny profit margin. They will shut down most operations in a long term, low profit economic situation, and try to wait it out. The economy would have eventually recovered without a war and there would have been no Baby Boom that a lot of we geezers came out of, but the world would now be a far different place than it is now. Imagine the 60’s without Boomers!

The US government is considering a package of as much as $900 billion for economic stimulus, but is it considering the rest of the world that is struggling under hard economic conditions?

More next time …

This is my Brasstacks for February 4, 2009