Both Tom and Bob claim that Roosevelt's policies didn't end the Depression. But those policies did end the Depression—it just took them 15 years to do it.* Duh!

SURVEY: ECONOMISTS SAY RECESSION IS OVER, PREDICT MODERATE, SLOW-PACED [emphasis mine] RECOVERY

More than 80 percent of economists believe the recession is over and an expansion has begun, but they expect the recovery will be slow as worries over unemployment and high federal debt persist...“The survey found that the vast majority of business economists believe that the recession has ended but that the economic recovery is likely to be more moderate than those typically experienced following steep declines,” said NABE President-elect Lynn Reaser, chief economist at Point Loma Nazarene University.

The forecasters upgraded the economic outlook for the next several quarters, but cautioned that unemployment rates and the federal deficit are expected to remain high through the next year. Forecasters now expect the economy, as measured by gross domestic product, to advance at a 2.9 percent pace in the second half of the year, after falling for four straight quarters for the first time on records dating to 1947. They expect a 3 percent gain in 2010.

To quote Felix Unger, "Sure—and chickens have lips." I guarantee you that the majority of "economists" back during the Depression were predicting this same "slow recovery" nonsense. Wanna bet that ten years from now when we still haven't recovered, we'll still be told that the recovery is "slow" and it "takes time"?
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*No emails please. I am well aware that Roosevelt's policies prolonged the Depression rather than ended it.

UPDATE: Kevin Duffy writes: Your blog post about “economists” taking the recovery bait in the 1930s was spot on.

I highly recommend a 60 page book called, Oh Yeah? published in 1931 by Edward Angly. He quotes businessmen, bankers, politicians, central bankers, economists — optimistic even as late as 1931. Here are a few gems:

“During the past year you have carried the credit system of the nation safely through a most difficult crisis. In this success you have demonstrated not alone the soundness of the credit system, but also the capacity of the bankers in emergency.”
~ President Herbert Hoover, address before the annual convention of The American Bankers Association, Cleveland, October 2, 1930

“The worst is over without a doubt.”
~ James J. Davis, Secretary of Labor, June 29, 1930

“The glow of righteous satisfaction that many have felt in their recent savings should be replaced by the knowledge that thrift under certain conditions is very wasteful.”
~ William Trufant Foster, leading pre-Keynesian economist in the “underconsumptionist tradition,” September, 1931

It is truly déjà vu all over again…on steroids.