Good Lord, I'm 54 years old. How much economic crap do you think I've already ridden out?

It's instructive to look at current stock levels, employment levels, inflation rates, interest rates, and many other basic statistics, and look at them from a historical point of view.

Here's a little historical reality check:

Interest rates and inflation, 18 percent. Mortgage rates, 16 percent. Unemployment rate when the article was written, 7.5 percent.

Yet here we are. How many economic booms have we had since then?

The stock market right now is flailing, but it's still over 600 points above the DotCom record of 2000. The employment level (number of payroll jobs) is at an all-time high--most presidents would have given an arm for an unemployment rate of 4.9 percent.

We'll get past this, too, but like the wringing out we had in the early 1980s, it may be that the Fed and the others ought to let a little economic pain through to balance things instead of trying to put pennies in the fuse box.

We could talk about the size of government, which is double what it was in the Carter years in constant dollars, but nobody really wants to go there. If you read the TIME article, nobody wanted to go there back then, either.