I think there is a real difference between the time of the Great Depression and now. Amongst our nation’s economic and political leaders, there is little reluctance to print and spend more money, in huge amounts if necessary, in response to recession. Back in the early 1930’s, many were reluctant.
Ultimately, we need real changes that cannot be avoided:
1) Greater US resources devoted to producing goods and services that the rest of the world wants.
2) Lower US consumption of foreign goods and greater US savings rates
But we can certainly avoid, by printing and spending money, large-scale unemployment and GDP declines as in the Great Depression. The people employed may be digging and filling holes in the ground, producing little or no real economic value, but they will be “employed” and the GDP will appear to be higher as a result than it would otherwise be. (It won’t really be, of course.) It might well lead to more real economic waste, because it will give less incentive for people to get any job they can in export or import-substitute activities, but politically-driven intervention is like a tax on the real economy, and we will have to pay some of that tax one way or another.
