On the recordJune 15, 2010
George Santayana wrote: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Today, we must remember the past. We must learn from past mistakes, and we must do our best to avoid repeating them. In its response to the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Federal Government made a serious mistake. It is important to remember this past so we are not condemned to repeat it. The stock market crashed in 1929. By 1933, the unemployment rate reached a high of 25 percent. A few years later--4 years later, to be precise--in 1937, the economy was rebounding. The unemployment rate had fallen to 14 percent, gross domestic product was growing at an average rate, if you can believe it, of 9 percent a year, and the stock market had more than doubled over the past 4 years. That was 1937. The economy was on the road to recovery. But this exceptional economic growth did not just happen. It resulted from strong actions by the Federal Government.
