Library of Congress

With unemployment at 8.5 percent, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich finally called it:

This is still not the Great Depression of the 1930s, but it is a Depression.

Reich notes that if you count the underemployed (working less than the full-time hours they want), the rate rises to take in one of every six Americans. Put the economy on a war footing, he recommends, with government outlays for infrastructure and education. And hurry up with guaranteed health care for all.

Anyone disappointed that President Barack Obama didn’t make the pronouncement himself while on his European sojourn should consider that President Herbert Hoover wasn’t the one anoint his depression as “The Great,” either.

Hoover may have preferred the word “depression” to “panic” (or even to “recession,” I’ve heard), but he was far from the first president to use the D-word, according to the History News Network.

And it was likely Lionel Robbins — an economist and writer, like Reich — who first called it “The Great Depression” — in 1934.

By then Hoover was out of office, never having uttered the word “The” before the words “Great Depression” as president.

Related: When depressions were great