Economist Richard Wolff told Hill.TV that unlike the Great Depression, the past decade or so has not created the kind of government leadership needed to steer the U.S. out of the current economic crisis.
“In the 1930s, a massive movement politically to the left occurred,” said Wolff, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts. “They all worked together and they produced the pressure that got FDR to make a new deal.”
“We’ve had almost the opposite. We’ve had a lurch to the right, at least for the last 15 to 20 years, culminating now in President Trump in all that he’s doing, with the unions weaker than they’ve been in half a century, with socialist and communist parties almost extinct,” he added. “So we don’t have any of the pressures that might give us some sense of what to do.”
Wolff said he does not believe presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden would be able to handle the economic problems well, but that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) might have been able to tackle them.
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