"Worse than the Depression"

It sounds like the Republicans have finally reached their goal of making sure the US doesn't have enough money to fund more social spending. I guess that means they won?

This could be worse than the Great Depression, but not for the reasons cited. During GD, we had enormous social and physical capital to work with. That is no longer true. The physical capital has been dismantled or shipped overseas, and the our social capital, the moral strength of our people, our families, and our communities, have all been depreciated.

Re: if collapse causes transportation mostly to shut down...then food shipments into cities will mostly cease...____Even in the Great Depression transportation did not shut down. You people seem to expecting a catastrophe on the magnitude of nuclear war, which is what it would take to mnake transporting goods impossible. Even if a some trucking companies go bankrupt other companies would pick up the slack (that's econ 101, and also common sense). In a true disaster, I can see the government simply nationalizing trucking and employing truck drivers to make necessary deliveries. These survivalist dystopian fantasies (much as we saw about the Y2K bug) seem to assume that human beings are all dumber than bricks and are incapable of finding workarounds when problems occur. Maybe some people are like that, but there's too many smart and capable people also out there and their brains will not quit working if GM goes belly up. If there's food here and hungry people there, then someone will find a way to get it to them, if only because there will be money to be made in doing so (and I wouldn't completely discount humanitarian motives either). ____Re: During GD, we had enormous social and physical capital to work with. That is no longer true. ____???__We have 300 million people, most of them able-bodied and well-educated. We have a large country with plenty of natural resources and fertile soil. We have enormous technical know-how-- probably the world's best and greatest (there's a reason so many foreigners come to be educated here after all). And yes we still have factories despite the defeatist hand-wringing about how we "don't make anything any more". We do. Relative to the whole size of our economy or import/export sector is actually smaller proportionally than that of most other major countries.____Re: Our social capital, the moral strength of our people, our families, and our communities, have all been depleted.____People were no more moral or virtuous in the 1930s than they are now. The idea that there was some kind of lost virtuous golden age (other than the Garden of Eden) is a lot of taurine byproduct. If you could be transported back to 1930 you would encounter plenty of moralists wringing their hands over how the nation's morals had collapsed and looking back to the Golden age of the Victorians-- who probably did the same, but looked back to the stout virtue of the Founders. It's just human nature to forever deplore the sins du jour and What The Younger Generation Is Coming To. The past is always seen through rose-colored glases because we ourselves were younger and less acquainted with reality back then (and it's very easy to paint the era before we were born in any rosy shade we choose).