On the recordJune 9, 2010
During the Depression, though, as you just said, there was a lot of spending on infrastructure during that period of time. It did not take care of the unemployment. If you look at the unemployment rate during the Great Depression, it stayed relatively flat. It went up and down some, but it stayed up a bit, and then it fell way off in spite of all the big government spending and all the spending on infrastructure. Back then, though, under the Roosevelt administration, they created the WPA and the CCC camps and things like that. They put people to work, who were on government welfare, building all that infrastructure. Now we're paying people not to work.
