So, the New York Times reports today that the unemployment rate has "soared" to 6.7 percent--which means that it's even higher, given the fact that unemployment statistics don't reflect those who have dropped out of the labor force temporarily or permanently.

People commenting on the article wonder whether we've crossed the Rubicon from "recession" to "depression." It took economists seven months to admit this was a recession at all; I have to think the fact that it was an election year played into their reticence.

On a similar note, a late November This American Life podcast featured a wonderful set of Studs Terkel interviews with people who had lived through the Great Depression. The interviews, which later went into his oral history of the Great Depression, were taped in 1971, but they still had a lot of resonance.

Although our country would be a lot better off in the long run if Obama were sworn in today, or yesterday, than on January 20, I do think we're in better shape than our predecessors during the Great Depression of the 1930s. We know what works. No matter how the Republicans try to deny it, putting money directly into the pockets of the poor does work, and if people can be building infrastructure while receiving direct aid, even better. Maybe it will be green technologies or high-speed trains that are constructed this time, rather than huge hydroelectric dams; maybe it will be forests of solar panels in the desert rather than making camps in our national forests, as the CCC did in the 1930s. But it will be something.

My favorite New Deal programs were the art and music and theater and writing programs that flourished under the WPA. How wonderful it would be to have an artistic and cultural resurgence of that kind again!