The article captures the income disparity and "kill government regulation" causative factors of our current risky economic system. The perils of continuation of such a set of policies are pointed out. As an editor's choice letter says: Arthur Miller in his autobiography 'Timebends' said that in his opinion America is utterly invested in forgetting, and nowhere is this more evident than in their forgetting of the Great Depression.

An excellent comparison of past and present economic times with data that are truly impressive. The author sums up the "logic" of trickle-down economics: "Never mind how these statistics make a mockery of the thesis that encouraging the top 1 percent of Americans to gorge themselves on 20 percent of the pie breeds prosperity for all." As for Treasury Secretary Paulson's proposed financial reform; it's the usual Bushie get-rid-of-regulation special-interests pandering hidden behind the mask of "helping" Americans.

A decent opinion piece that offers sound data indicating that we are no where near another Great Depression while arguing the current recession could turn severe.

The article provides a wide view with numerous links for background information. The financial sector voices have little credibility with their sustained denials of impending downturns, even as benchmarks fell one after another. That renders accurate assessment of our true economic health difficult, but the author marshals numbers and cases for a credible analysis. This should be stressed as a global phenomena, for a collapse of the U.S. economy leaves trillions in paper debts worldwide best burned for heat value in a new glacial economic epoch.

Scary stuff.

Yes, it's a good piece, presenting the possibilities of further massive worldwide economic collapse and the factors that might mitigate against it. Maybe the question really should be the extent to which the 80s and 90s resembled the 20s? And maybe the countercyclical moves the New Deal was able to make were possible because the country and its citizens weren't already trillions in debt? And maybe, ultimately, what pulled us out of the depression was a major war? And, if the US doesn't hit economic bottom and pull the rest of the world with it, the rest of the world will discover that it can do okay without us?

This opinion piece has a lot of faults. The author makes major errors on almost every factual item. Start with the first sentence. Maximums for food stamp eligibility were substantially increased by the Bush administration. Numbers are not comparable with any years before about 2004. The stock market crash of 2000 is ignored. Real estate values are back to where they should be with normal rates of increase (extrapolating from say 1995 to 2002 with a straight line you get today's sale prices in most areas, the doubling of prices in many areas has been corrected for). Income inequality has not increased, but household composition has changed, with many more singles, thus reducing the "household" average compared to 20 years ago ... More »