The Not So Great Depression

Tonight Bob, Joe, and I went out to eat at Mercado Juarez.  We don't go there very often, but over the last couple of years whenever we have gone, we were some of the only customers.  Imagine our surprise tonight when we walked in to a full house.  I felt that De Ja Vu feeling, like I seem to remember a time when restaurants were full on a Saturday night, but it had been so long...I looked around and found a couple of reader boards advertising some really great specials.  There was a $6.00 dinner board and a $5.00 dinner board.  I looked carefully.  Were they advertisng lunch?  No!  Usually dinners run about $13.00 and up.  Yes, I know, the Muirs are really big spenders.

As we sat in the restaurant it was nice to see families celebrating, couples cozying up, and large groups of people gathering and enjoying the local Tex-Mex.  Do I really believe everyone was ordering off of the 5 or 6 dollar board? Probably not, but the full restaurant was heart warming.  What was even better was to see a bunch of new waitresses, cooks and bus boys.  This is a example of the new normal.  Maybe small companies doing this type of outreach will help to end this economic depression we find ourselves in.  I wish small actions like these could help, but on Monday will the stock market take another huge drop because Turkey's economy is failing because Greece is failing, even though Mercado Juarez was hopping on Saturday night? 

When Herbert Hoover talked to Congress about the economy in 1931 he declared that congress could not legislate away a depression, nor could he declare it over by executive order.  You may recall that Hoover, along with almost every other Republican got the boot in 1932.  When the economy is screwed up the government has to look busy and concerned, even if their efforts are fruitless, or risk getting kicked out of office.  Look at FDR.  He looked busy and concerned about the economy, but his New Deal was largely ineffective.  If it had been effective, the Great Depression might not have lasted until 1940.  But I think the US population, in general, was bouyed up by the fact that he was doing something more than sitting on his hands, waiting for the economy to self correct.

I was wondering what they called the Great Depression during the Great Depression so I did a search and found out that until 1931 it was referred to as The Crash, referring to the stock market crash of 1929.   Obviously no one knew it would be such a long, deep, widespread depression during the early days.  Herbert Hoover was the first to refer to it as the Great Depression.  He didn't say, we are experiencing the Great Depression, He just said that we were in a great depression.  So for the next three years the economic trouble was called The Depression.  Then in 1934 Lionel Robbins wrote a book called The Great Depression.  At that point, everyone started calling it the Great Depression.  This became a self fulfilling prophecy because, unfortunately, it lasted for 6 more years.

It kind of makes you wonder what the history books will call this period in time.  Obviously, from the title of this blog post, I have an idea for a name.  The Not So Great Depression graphically lets the reader know that the economy really sucks.  It also implies that we have hope that it won't last for 11 years.