Posted on 11/07/2010 10:39:14 PM PST by Arthur McGowan
Bill Cunningham tonight repeated the canard that WWII ended the Depression. Then, a liberal caller pointed out that, if that's true, it means that government spending and borrowing can end a depression. Cunningham had no answer.
Of course, the answer is that WWII didn't end the Depression. The Depression didn't end until 1946. WWII took place DURING the Depression.
“Boy that is so true, to watch clips from entertainers of that time they where not so happy with policies of the 1930’s.”
Yes, at that time you could find a lot of political diversity in the entertainment industry. There were Democrats, Republicans, conservatives, liberals, communists, etc. Nowadays, if you aren’t a far-left Democrat and you don’t support the gay agenda, you don’t work in Hollywood. There’s virtually no independence of thought there today.
Anyway, another thing that helped get the economy going again after WWII was the fact that people had tons of money saved up because there was nothing to buy during the war.
Just my point. The factories weren’t making cars, or radios, or refrigerators. They were making planes, tanks, bombs, etc. Everyone was working—but that’s not prosperity.
“And when WWII ended, we had no equals. No one to really compete with us economically. Certainly, the Soviets were our biggest military threat. But no one was our economic equal.”
Well yes, Europe and Japan were in ruins. Eventually, they did rebuild with more modern factories that could out-compete the US. And because of the Cold War, most American technical and scientific know-how went into the defense sector. Japan meanwhile put all their resources into the consumer sector. So they built really great cameras and stereos while we built really great fighter jets.
Excuse me, but there was no unemployment during WWII. There weren’t many consumer goods, but output was about as high as it possibly could have been.
But they were saving, and the savings helped fuel demand after the war.
WWII ended unemployment.
When you take all of the unemployed men, put them in a uniform, hand them a rifle, then send them overseas, they are no longer unemployed.
Wars end unemployment the same way that arming your children and sending them out to kill neighbors ends their overindulging in the playing of video games.
There is a problem here. In 1945 through 1946, returning armed services personel found little jobs to do. there become oppotunities for employment, education and so forth when America changed from a war production to civil consumer production. Housing construction boomed, veterans benefits for higher education boomed private enteurnership boomed too. Cunningham needs to have his facts straight before he airs them on the radio. Oh I forget Cunningham is a conservative radio host that has a tendency to insert his foot in his moth because he refuses to be prepared with the facts before speaking. No wonder Cunningham has the tendency to cause more controversy than make factual comments.
Not completely accurate.
The Black Plague obviously had many and varied effects on the economy. Among the major ones was that it drastically increased productivity.
Europe at the time had an almost entirely agrarian economy and was beginning to press up against the population level possible under these conditions.
When the BP killed off 1/3 or so of the population, the surviving peasants, not surprisingly, concentrated onto the most fertile of the remaining land. They also had a proportionately increased stock of animals, tools and other equipment. Productivity per man hour therefore went up quite considerably, creating a more efficient and therefore wealthier economy. Also one where the laborers had much improved bargaining power and so a less steeply pyramidal one.
Of course, Europeans of the time spent most of their free time killing each other, burning villages and towns, etc., proportionately much more than even during the 20th, which tends to be bad for the economy. :)
The Economy was bound to boom after WWII because the US was the “last man standing”. Most other industrialized countries took years, even decades to recover from the war. The US was the unchallenged technological and manufacturing giant for the next 25+ years.
After the war ended, there was another nasty recession.
The war ended and millions of men were dumped in the workforce. It was hardly boom times.
I was born in 1946. I don’t remember much of the years immediately after WW II but my earliest memories were of my father being unemployed. He did find a paying position as an apprentice shortly after returning but there was a glut of machinists and he was out of work again. My parents took positions in an orphanage that paid room and board for us. Dad worked a few side jobs as a maintenance man. His first real job wasn’t until about 1951.
The GI bill did a lot more for the economy than all the government defense and infrastructure spending. It also paid for itself, with better job opportunities people paid more in taxes and with the housing boom construction jobs were plentiful, resulting in more income and property taxes paid.
Do we have any second world war vets here? Would be nice to hear from them instead of boomers with an agenda.
I was young and then in uniform during WWII. My recall has many features noted by others. I also have vivid memories of my mother begging bankers with tears in her eyes to not take away the house my deceased dad had built. I do not believe WWII ended the great depression. WWII was a huge social pipeline going through the depression. The end of the depression was when the needs of people were matched by the realization that our Nation needed and was capable of producing other than materials for war. Add to this the G.I. Bill which provided the opportunity for many like myself to be involved in a vigorous technology and science
environment. There was still need to be in the world but even the world was able to get into the economic game. Since then our Nation has been on the usual ups and downs economically. I have a deep fear that what has and is happening under Obama is that if there is a crisis such as WWII this Nation will have been stripped of the industrial capability and even vital technology protection needed to deal with the crisis.
No significant competition helps a bunch.
Fair enough. You probably also could say that WW II ushered in new technologies, and a change of psychology that set the stage for an economic turnaround after the war. I would just warn against the misconception many have that it is the destruction itself is economically positive.
You are quite right. Producing massive amounts of stuff, shipping it to the other side of the world and then destroying it there isn’t the most economically productive of activities. :)
I don’t have an agenda. I just wanted to contribute my opinion and memories.
WWII did what it did, which is, created a massive productive capacity to supply not only the unusual demands of the US armed forces (ships by the thousands, millions of tons of explosives, bombs, ammo, in addition to the tanks, trucks, planes mentioned above), but also supply Lend-Lease to the UK and USSR. The labor to run the defense plants came from what had been non-traditional sources (women, and formerly unemployed/unemployable southern rural blacks) and from 4-Fs and conscientious objectors.
So, yes, of course WWII ended the Great Depression, insofar as the unemployment rate dropped dramatically to levels probably never seen before. And this was during the huge drop in the agrarian population, which had happened as a consequence of mechanized agriculture (i.e., the replacement of draft animals by tractors and trucks). There had been a major shift off farms, and marginal seasonal labor (farmhands) couldn’t find work. Some ancestors and other relatives from northern rural Michigan had to relocate to the Detroit area just to earn any kind of living.
When the troops came home (most of them by the end of 1946), demobilization had been going on for most of a year. There was new need for jobs, and a pent-up demand for stuff that had been out of production during the war years, such as autos, new homes, and for new gadgets (such as television). A lot of people who had postponed their life plans finally got to settle down with their loved ones and start families. Those “Rosie the Riveter” positions ceased to exist because they’d been created to manufacture stuff that was no longer needed, and women mostly left the industrial workforce. Whole model families of tanks, planes, and other vehicles were designated obsolete and scrapped by the tens of thousands.
During the 1950s, smaller automakers — which had contributed lots of production for the war effort — wound up not being able to restart auto production effectively and either vanished or merged with other smaller producers. That consolidation went on throughout the late 1940s and the entire 1950s. The final move was the acquisition of AMC by Chrysler during the Iacocca years. Studebaker went under in the early 1960s, surviving as a single model, the Avanti. The Avanti continued as a specialty model, built in small numbers each year for buyers who had to pay a substantial amount up front, then wait for their car to be built. One of those customers wound up buying the company in the late 1970s or early 1980s. In the 1990s there were plans to broaden the line to include a four-door and an SUV model. I believe production has now stopped, probably in the last four or five years.
Overall, the US auto industry had a 10-million model year in the 1950s (I think it was in 1956), which was its peak for a long while to come. Chevy reached about 40 percent of the US market in that same timeframe, the mid-1950s.
By the late 1960s, US heavy industry had in general peaked. The need for miniatured circuits arose out of the need for US missile technology to reach the USSR. The US had problems with ICBMs, and the Ed Teller H-bomb — an approach that worked in test, but was so enormous it was superseded by a different approach — required a big delivery system. The Teller H-bomb led the US to develop the F-1 engine (a million+ pound thrust rocket motor) in the 1950s, along with the B-52. Both continued in development for different reasons, but the original need was to deliver the boxcar-sized Teller H-bomb.
Von Braun wanted and got continued development of his F-1 when it was cancelled by the US military. Had that not happened, the US would not have made it to the Moon. Period. This happened years before Kennedy was in the White House.
The main drag on the US economy during the 1950s was the dead weight of obsolete overcapacity plants; but again, had those plants not been around, there’s no way that Americans would have been able to buy all the kinds of modern-life things we pretty much take for granted today — even though we don’t necessarily build most of them in the US now.
During the 1970s, between the OPEC embargo and the EPA-enabling laws, US industry started to take it on the chin. A very mean cycle of so-called COLAs and rising prices, along with the need for greater fuel economy, brought about a massive build-out in Japan, which over a period of a decade or so shifted into other Asian countries with lower labor costs. The big player now is China, with India coming up from behind. The local markets there have already started to grow and gobble up production, which means we’ll see more Chinese-owned and managed manufacturing in the US.
The drug civil war south of our border pretty much postpones any further economic development in Mexico.
Semiconductors and related consumer products, small appliances, autos, and heavy vehicles (bulldozers, cranes, etc) are more and more produced outside the US but sold into the US market. Steel, aluminum, and other metals and raw materials are also sold into the US market from abroad.
Thanks Arthur McGowan.
The Truman government was intent on keeping price controls and rationing as long as it could get away with them.
The British and French took years longer to recover because they stayed socialist.
The W.Germans, on the other hand, recovered very quickly since they removed price controls on a weekend when the Allies counn't prevent it from happening and thus, we had the 'German miracle' where Germany recovered very quickly.
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