It may not be as bad as we think, Andy McCarthy suggests today:
"Going to high school in the Carter Seventies, I remember sitting in the gas lines. Toward the end of Carter's tenure, interest rates were around 20%, inflation was at close to 14%, and unemployment was just over 7% (it soared over 10% before the Reagan recovery kicked in). I don't mean to minimize the straits we're in, and I appreciate that things are likely to get worse — maybe a lot worse — before they get better. But aren't Democrats skipping over a pretty awful bit of history when they say this is as bad as it's been in 75 years?"
I agree. I remember that, back then, the economy was so bad, and stayed bad for so long, that there were experts and historians writing that the presidency, and the nation's problems, were too difficult for anyone to handle them with success, and that America had entered an age of "limits" from which it might not ever escape. I don't know that, today, we've yet reached that kind of bottom.
