Another request for $1.3 billion more will come in a few months.
This compares to the previous 1938 request for approx. $500 million.
The war all told will cost the US neighborhood of $500 billion.
And that was cheap, compared to the relative costs, in blood and treasure, paid by such countries as the Soviet Union and Germany.
Relatively cheap, all right, but by 1945 the country was straining a bit. Here is an excerpt from "Flags of our Fathers," by James Brady. These sections (from ch. 15 and 16) discuss the bond tour organized around the surviving Mt. Surabachi flag raisers.
In the 1940's concept of American democracy, war expenses were considered outside the normal federal budget. A wartime government was obliged to take its case repeatedly before the citizenry, keeping it accurately informed and hoping for a patriotic volunteer response.
War bonds were the chief mechanism for this volunteer funding, esentially a citizen's loan to the government. Purchase of a bond, at the issue price of $18.75, gave the government temporary use of the buyer's money; the buyer in turn could expect a yield, in ten years, of $25. The government stimulated these purchases through periodic national puublic relations efforts known as War Loan Drives. Eac drive included newpaper and radio ads, direct mailing, and, as it centerpiece, a coast-to-coast barnstorming show featuring celebrities, war heroes, marching bands, and patriotic orators. These were known as Bond Tours.
[Snip]
Fourteen billion dollars, to be exact. That was the monetary goal set by Teasury for the Seventh Bond Tour. Seven billion from companies and businesses, and seven billion from individuals.
Fourteen billion: a sum equaling the highest goal of any of the eight bond drives of World War II. A sum larger than the government's expenditures in prewar 1941 and equaling a full quarter of its budget for fiscal 1946.
Fourteen billion to keep feeding, clothing, sheltering, and arming the millions of men and women still fighting World war II, and provide more planes, ships, and tanks for their effort. Fourteen billion for a war that was costing $250 million a day; $175,000 a minute; a war being waged mostly now against a Pacific enemy whose population was still replacing its armies' destruction rate of a quarter million men a year.
Fourteen billion to be solicited from a population of 160 millions: nearly one hundred dollars, on average, from every man, woman, and child in America. This in a country where an annaal income of seventeen hundred dollars comfortably supported a family of four; where a Harvard education cost a thousand dollars; where a hotel room in New York could be had for three dollars; where a good breakfast cost thirty-two cents.