> You are no longer "otherwise-strong" if you have been impacted by COVID economically. The economy pre-pandemic no longer exists. It will not magically exist again in the future.
Citation needed for this. The 1920s would seem to differ.
Part of that was because many of the countermeasures taken during the Depression were counterproductive.
Also, it turns out that fighting a world war is a good economic stimulus. I believe the first American recession after the Great Depression was a very brief post-war recession caused by scaling down war production. IOW, war production was such a large chunk of the economy that simply doing less of it because we won was enough to cause a measurable GDP dip.
It also took four years after the Great Depression started for the Federal Government to pass the New Deal that helped pull the country out of the gutter. As much as I wish Congress had moved faster and done more with the CARES Act they’re still way ahead of their counterparts a century earlier.
The new deal extended the great depression and it's mishandling is extremely well known. Destroying goods to drive up prices, centrazlied price fixing, the blue eagle program, wage controls, the reason healthcare is tied to employment.
The new deal was a failure and caused long lasting damage to the USA.
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.
And the smell of rot fills the country.
Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
FDR was effective at getting himself elected to office. Double-digit employment persisted until the Second World War, which the US only entered during his third term. It's a great political achievement to get elected to a third term as President despite unemployment remaining above 10% for the entirety of your first two terms, but that doesn't erase unemployment remaining above 10% for the entirety of FDR's first two terms.
Yeah, FDR was so effective that when the supreme court ruled his actions unconstitutional, he threatened to pack the court with his own appointees and now there are practically no limits on what the federal government can do.
Citation needed for this. The 1920s would seem to differ.