The Great Depression, Lesson 7

The United States of America is a great power in the world and has been since its creation.  Even great nations can misstep.  The Great Depression is one of the biggest failures of the people and government in the United States.  The Great Depression was in fact a failure of the free market but was in no way helped by the interference of the government.  When the Depression happened it was assisted in further crashing by the interference of the government.  While there were surely ways the government could have helped the economy, the way the government went about “helping” was not a very helpful way.

                The government’s increasing involvement was a big reason to why the economy took so long to recover.  For example, President Roosevelt imposed so many takes hikes on the people and businesses they had very little money to put into hiring new employees.  Roosevelt was greatly in favor of tax hikes and in 1934 the government had implemented tax rates up to 90% on the top income bracket.  While the government may have needed money to keep funding their many groups, they would never have needed those groups if the people hadn’t been out of work.  The U.S. people were in so much need of money and yet the government still continued to raise taxes.  By imposing all of these taxes on the people the government was majorly interfering.

It is government interference like that that led to an even greater plunge in the U.S. economy.  While some forms of interference is needed to help the economy recover, not all of them are helpful.  In the majority of cases the economy could rebound by its self and recover just fine.  In class we discussed how the great depression was preceded by large amounts of government interference.  This could be a huge reason as to why the Great Depression ended up being as bad as it was.  The economy does go through periods of rise and fall.  This was the first time that there was major government interference which could be a huge reason to why the economy plunged so far.  The free market had fallen by its self but the government interference was a contributing factor to why the economy fell so much farther.