I also hear Rush Limbaugh frequently say that WW II brought us out of the Great Depression. This is also nonsense. Destruction doesn't bring prosperity! It's not possible that creating and then destroying large amounts of wealth is good for an economy. What brought us out of the Great Depression was an end to Roosevelt's policies. He himself ended many of them and turned to business leaders when he had to build the economy for war.
Fully and totally disagree! WWII, since it was not on our land, mobilized an undercapacity manufacturing colossus overnight into a 24/7 productive enterprise. Yes, the government was paying the wages, but the effort ended the unemployment of the depression, while the national debt was paying the tab.
Today it's different. Today the national debt increases daily due to the bloodsuckers of the nation, me included on SS, without adding anything to our nation.
Beg to differ. Limbaugh was right. WW II is what got us out of the Great Depression.
But you're right, too. Destruction of wealth doesn't bring prosperity. But, in the case of WW II, we weren't the ones suffering destruction; we were meting it out.
Europe and Japan are the ones who took an economic beating in WW II.
Destruction had nothing to do with it. What was destroyed in the US?
WW2 put the country to work...building ships, airplanes, tanks, bombs, guns...and other war stuff. I think that is what is meant by the universal opinion that WW2 brought an end to the Great Depression.
The national workforce was mobilized working for the war effort.
WWII had two effects on the US economy.
The first, short-duration effect was to put a huge swath of the population to work making armaments, and to take another huge swath of the population out of the workforce and put them into uniform. We had an over-supply of labor (with the 15% unemployment) going into WWII. The vast rush to put men into the armed forces solved that labor over-supply issue, and brought wages up to sustainable levels immediately.
The second, longer-term effect was to destroy huge amounts of production capacity in other countries while leaving ours intact. We then had captive markets for our manufactured goods following the war, which led to the prosperity of the 50’s. By 1930, the economies of Europe and Japan, coupled with the US, had a great deal of surplus production capacity, much of it built on credit. The implosion of prices led to trade wars and debt deflation.
When the world has excess production capacity, war is often the result. You might read up on the work of a Russian ag economist by the name of Krondatieff, which shows the cyclical nature of these things.