Candidates, How Will You Fix The Depression?

Barack and Hillary keep having stupid televised debates about flag pins and Sinbad. John McCain continues his sad "About Schmidt" tour of places where he used to be young, a half century ago. Cable news and political blogs somehow manage to fill the time and space, every day, with creative variations of last week's and last month's and last year's Campaign 2008 stories.

Meanwhile, the long-denied Recession is smelling a lot more like a Depression, specifically the decade-long "Great Depression" that wrecked tens of millions of American lives and permanently altered the political and economic systems of the United States.

There are all sorts of terrifying parallels for people who study this stuff: insane debt/income ratios, asset bubbles, runs on commodities, a tight credit market, collapsing banks and investment houses. But the latest evidence is so simple, even a common illiterate U.S. high-school graduate could understand it.


People are going to the movies again, in droves. According to MSN financial columnist Michael Brush, the first three months of this year saw a 4.5% increase in the nation's box-office take. It's not like the movies are suddenly better. It's just that a movie theater is one of the only relatively cheap ways to get away from the bills and foreclosures and $4 gas and food that costs double what it did a few years ago. Eight bucks for a movie ticket is a relative bargain.

The last time movie theaters saw such a boom in business, the country was at the bottom of the 1982 Reagan Recession -- a slump so pronounced that many economists now call it a full-on Depression.

Before that, Americans flocked to the dark retreat of the movie house in the depths of the 1970s recession/energy crisis/inflation nightmare. (We were also losing a war and trying to get rid of a deeply crooked, unpopular president.)

But the biggest boom time for the movies was during the 1930s, when one in four workers couldn't find work, middle-class families rented their bedrooms to homeless laborers, kids starved to death in the streets and men fought over the scraps in a restaurant's garbage bins.

Maybe somebody on the teevee could ask McCain and Obama and Hillary about that.

Ken Layne is editor of Wonkette.