Ok, here's the one page history lesson on the period of time as I don't have the time or typing to write it all out here, and it's a good page.
H102 Lecture 18: The Crash and the Great Depression
Now here is what they didn't put into the books.
My Father was a Farmer during that time, one of the very few who didn't owe anything to the banks when the market crashed. There was NO minimum wage during that time, and didn't get set until 1938, one of the motivations to set one was because of the Depression.
Why?
It was a downward spiral. People had their hours and money cut down to reflect the reduced profits of the businesses, and people had less money to buy with. With less money, profits and income went down even further, and more jobs were cut and lost. Wages were reduced and no floor was set, some people were making 35 cents a week and that was considered a lot of money.
When all that 'paper' money vanished off the face of the banking industry and people scrambled to get their 'cash' out of the banks, something the fault of the still newish Federal Reserve was responsible for back then, the banks simply didn't have it to give back. They had no gold for the paper reciet, the dollar bill. Back then, banks issues the dollars. I still have a 10 dollar note from the bank of Erie, PA, dated 1929. No gold and no cash.
My Father had 17 acres of corn, 20 acres of wheat and 150 acres of oats. The stores didn't have the money to buy it because nobody was buying from the stores hardly. So he set up stalls of his own by the road and would sell 2 bushels for 10 cents. He then lowered it to a nickel, and then he had to give it away as it was going bad.
Nobody had the money to afford transportation of even small loads of the produce. My Father ate his own crops and it's why he and the rest of my Family in the area didn't starve to death.
With no minimum wage to provide an economic floor, with no social programs to put money back into the market even from the poorest American, enitre families literally starved to death with farmers who had granneries filled with food that was going to eventually spoil, those who were not in the drought areas.
Back then, there was no world wide media or anything that would record horrific and tragic events in the boonies. But I have no reason to disbelive it when my Father pulled his cart with his horses 250 miles to a town he heard that had people starving to death. He was going to give the entire cart load of corn and wheat to them for survival, he couldn't afford to put gas in either of his two trucks. He would have made two or three trips if necessary becuase of the situation. You see, he fed everybody in walking distance back then who came to him.
He didn't make it in time. At first, he thought it had become a ghost town and everybody had left, which happened a lot in small communties back then. But it just didn't feel right to him, and he started to check for people. It was a ghost town all right, but nobody had left. He merely turned around and passed out what he had to homes on the way back to his farm.
Now, today, like what happened in the last Recession of the early 90's, we had a minimum wage floor and social programs for the unemployed, which is like a safety net. They pump cash back into a hurt economy and revitalize the cash flow from the bottom up, taking the harsh edge of the economic recovery from the Federal Reserve.
No more small towns starving to death. I take that as a superior position to what it used to be, with no minimum wage.
Re: illegal immigrant deportation
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