NeverMore wrote:Nostalgiascape wrote: life's been tough.
Sure been hearing a lot of that lately. These are tough times to live in. I wonder if people who went through the great depression realized how bad it really was, at the time.
My mother lived through the Great Depression. Yes, they did. She had horror stories. Like, her best friend and valedictorian from high school worked six days a week at a doctor's office after graduation (in 1932). She did it all day long, Monday through Saturday, 9-5, for one year. Guess what she was paid?
Nothing. She did it for free, so the doctor would write her a recommendation and she could maybe get a paying job one year later.
Mama said they never saw money. Ever. That a grown man would sweep the streets downtown all day long and get paid one dime, and be happy to get it.
Whenever she saw movies or TV shows set during the Depression, she said they never showed how bad it really was. For instance, The Waltons was popular during the '70s, and it was supposedly about a large, impoverished family in rural western VA during the Depression. But my mother would watch it and say, "Those people aren't really poor. They have a mule. Poor people during the Depression didn't have mules."
She also told me that it was common for people to lose their homes because they couldn't pay the mortgage, but then the bank would allow them to live in their homes for an indefinite period of time. The banks would do that because there was no one to buy those repossessed houses, and an empty house falls to ruin faster than one which is occupied.
I suspect that, if we have another "Depression," it will be inflationary, not deflationary like the one in the '30s. Mama said they never saw money, but obviously, any small amount of money, even a dime, was worth a great deal back then. Now our government is printing paper money to cover our monstrously large national debt. That makes the money lose value. We are most likely going into a period where we have plenty of paper money, but it won't buy much. In fact, that is very likely already happening. The price of gasoline is going up at the pumps, but it is actually going down worldwide. We are paying more for it because our money is buying less.