Remember what "really" ended the depression, folks

[SoCalDem]

The New Deal & its facets started the ball rolling, and got people some jobs, but what really ENDED the depression was WWII..

The USA was the ONLY place in the world (at that time) with the manpower, the space & the capability to make the "stuff" needed for the war effort.

Our car companies were "commandeered" into the war effort..our commodities were rationed, our booming airplane production business was easily tranformed into war plane making, and once the men all left, there was an eager workforce of women, ready and willing to take over..for a 5-6 year period, there wasn't a whole lot of "babymaking" going on, and these women were doing their part to perhaps save the lives of their husbands, boyfriends, brothers, so they were a dedicated workforce.

The rest of the world was in turmoil, under attack, or broken financially from their version of the worldwide depression..

ONLY the US had the capability to grow food, make stuff for the war, and remain attack-free...

That's why the depression ended for us... and after the war, the Marshall Plan and the rebuilding of Europe & the occupation of Japan re-created their economies too..

Current USA has no capacity to "do it again", and the rest of the world is actually doing better than we are right now.. They HAVE a manufacturing base..we don't.. they have unions for their workers, they have universal health care, they have public transportation.. we have very little , if any of those things..

South Asia has been aggressive in the education of their young, at the very time we slacked off.

We sold the farm, we outsourced, and now we have little "reserve" to draw from.

A world war to "perk up our economy" is out of the question, and the "little flash-wars" we have become accustomed to, do nothing but drag our economy down even more..

We have no "Plan B"..

[ColbertWatcher]

1. What really ended the great depression was the jobs that were created to manufacture war ...

... we can do the same thing, except instead of building for war, we can build for energy independence.

[SoCalDem]

2. But will we??

We had all the information we "needed" when Carter tried to get it going..and then we did NOTHING for 30+ years:grr:

[ColbertWatcher]

8. The GOP needed to be exposed first.

The GOP was the problem and now everyone knows. The biggest hurdle is out of the way.

[Demeter]

10. Carter Was Cut Off From His Own Party

It was a personality clash. Too many prima donnas in the Legislature, too many Good Ole Boys in Carter's staff. Too many uppity plebes bitching about welfare queens.

And of course, Poppy was gunning for takeover, with his Reagan puppet and his Iran hostage crisis.

None of these things will come into play.

The GOP cannot even produce a credible puppet nowadays. Poppy will be dead before the next election cycle, and all his CIA, CYA buddies and supporters, too. Iran will not be an issue, nor any other foreign war, as we will not have the wherewithal. And the political money machine will be bankrupt. Most of the crooks will be in prison, if there's any Justice in the Obama Justice Department.

It might be a new Renaissance for the US. If we are lucky. I'm hopeful.

[Selatius]

13. Yeah, America went and voted for Ronald Reagan. It's like the lessons were forgotten.

Perhaps the children of the WW2 generation had simply forgotten what their parents had gone through because I know their parents voted for FDR some three decades earlier.

[cabluedem]

52. Reagan won in large part by depression/ WWII era voters

We can thank them for RRs nasty legacy leading up to the chimpster.

[melody]

3. Well, let's all just give up hope

Once again, I'm astounded at people who choose to see only the most dire scenario ahead of us.

The truth is, we are all going to die. Nothing changes that. There is no control over that which is, I think,
what people are actually seeing for themselves in these dystopian futurescapes.

Beyond that, we can only make do as well as we can. We have tremendous resources here. We will do fine.
We have to.

[Greyhound]

4. The fundamental truth, that we are trying so hard to wish out of existence,

is that an economy has to produce something to sustain. There is no way around this.

[buzzard]

56. I completely agree with this sentiment not only in the USA but Canada as well.n/t

[two gun sid]

5. Sounds like the position China's in today.

[girl gone mad]

29. They are in an even better position than we were,

because they are sitting on piles of our money. With the wealth destruction occurring now, those dollars are increasing in value while our assets are decreasing in value. At some point, they may be able to move in and purchase profitable American businesses, good land, mining and oil rights and other assets at fire sale (to them) prices.

[Selatius]

6. If the US economy were to slip into a deep recession, I'd recommend Obama follow FDR's lead.

Restart the WPA and other programs with the goal of providing employment as well as revitalizing necessary infrastructure needed to facilitate business.

You can't have good business if the roads and bridges you travel on are crumbling. Neither can you have good business if your business is under threat of flooding because somebody forgot to upgrade old and brittle levees.

Also, people would be put to work helping America gain some level of energy independence. How many people would it take to put a solar panel on every home in America? How many manufacturing workers, technicians, engineers, etc. would it take to build the infrastructure to mass produce solar panels on a nationwide scale? And how many would it take to build solar power farms and wind turbine farms?

[jaybeat]

42. He should do that regardless. It would work way better than the bailout.

Put half the BO money, $350B or so, into the pockets of working people, doing all of the infrastructure and energy independence work that needs doing. All of that money (well, most of it, the salary part) will get SPENT. Business incomes go up, and they won't NEED these endlessly revolving credit lines so much anymore. Workers might actually PAY DOWN their mortgages, reducing their principle and their monthly payments, leaving more money to SAVE--for a rainy day, and to provide the all-powerful "liquidity" that banks need so they aren't "leveraged" to hell and back.

I'm REALLY hoping that by only giving the Treasury the money in chunks, Obama can come in and re-engineer the whole thing. A heck of a lot of our economic problems can be fixed, not just short-term, but long-term, if we start practicing some "trickle-up" economics.

And for the owners who get richer from all this money people are spending? Let 'em keep it IF they reinvest in more and better jobs, better benefits, and new businesses that help people. But if they wanna use it to enlarge their McMansion, buy off a CongressCritter, or use it to make more on some shell-game gambling scheme. Take it. Tax it. ALL. We've got way too many good things to do with that money.

[scarletwoman]

7. So, basically, what we have to look forward to is being the biggest banana republic in the world.

WE'RE NUMBER ONE! USA! USA!

:banghead:
sw

[kenny blankenship]

12. with nuclear weapons and an infuriated populace

feeling itself being squeezed dry by insidious foreigners. A perfect opportunity for a RW militarist.

[wtmusic]

9. What really ended the depression was fear

of Adolf Hitler. More justified than any of the hype on Amahdinejad, Il, etc., but whether it's justified or not doesn't really matter.

[kenny blankenship]

11. World war won't perk up economy, but a collapse of global financial networks can happen

all the same. Regions like N. America Europe Asia may be driven to pull apart and raise barriers against each other. There will be great cheering about that in some places for understandable reasons. However, tension between great powers could reach levels not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis, particularly since one power is apt to accuse another one of extortion, and the other great power is apt to accuse the first of being a thief who'd better pay up. Great power conflicts can arise from an economic impasse, even though no one will come out of it an economic winner.

These are dangerous waters for our country-and the world. I can think of one political faction, and one political figure in particular, who are no doubt besides themselves with rage as they watch America's economic and military standing in the world declining daily. Are they opportunist enough to seize on chaos--the chaos of closed banks, closed polling places? People who cheer on collapse and welcome chaos should think twice.

[glowing]

14. Actually, we can do things differently and in a way that could lead the world.

We could go back to growing nutritious foods and safe meats.. We could have a re-do on our much needed infrastrucure.. but in a way that actually works for America.. the sprawling land mass that it is..

AT the core is the fundamental ability to change one's idea of what wealth is: Wealth can be clean air and water, healthy sustainable foods, healthcare actually encompassing a wholistic nature, public works that work for people, and an idea that arts, music, science, technology, literature, and philosophy are worth their weight in gold... buying cheap trinkets to help ease the disconect is not an economy we need to vamp up.

[barbtries]

15. we'll have to come up with one

there are still great natural resources and many brilliant people here.

[YellowRubberDuckie]

16. We were talking about that at work the other day.

My boss is a history fanatic, and we were talking about just that. What happens when we can't manufacture anything? Apparently there are a lot of plants across the country that are being maintained, even though they aren't being used. The government has plans in case something like that were to happen. The government has commandeered such closed plants before. Apparently a lot of manufacturing was done out of the country then too, but we managed to pick up and make it through then and it can be done again.
Duckie

[4 t 4]

37. I would feel so good about that

if we started making things again.

[mmonk]

17. That's what conservatives say to prevent any ideas

of any government works programs from taking hold.

[PetrusMonsFormicarum]

18. Cataclysm as force for change

Maybe instead of a world-spanning war between various peoples, we will join as one against a common enemy that threatens us all. Environmental cataclysm. Superflu. Asteroid. How about them fukin' aliens?

The jobs that Obama is going to need to create are jobs that cannot be outsourced.

[Selatius]

22. I choose alien invasion, simply because Independence Day had awesome special effects.

:silly:

[malaise]

19. Plan B begins when

people burn every credit card and start supporting their own local farmers, manufacturers, engineers, teachers, scientists, etc.
Barter works - you give the plumber farm products for his services; you exchange fish for farm goods.
Go local - weave, sew, etc and in the process save the environment.

[scarletwoman]

23. We really need to decentralize and localize. Our survival is going to depend on community-based

systems. We need to be able to simply bypass the uber-systems.

I've been urging people to quit using credit cards for YEARS, and you'd think I was telling them to kill their mothers. Maybe that will change now?

sw

[malaise]

32. Absolutely

:hi:

[pokerfan]

20. wars are expensive

We were forced to take on an incredible amount of national debt: $3T+ in today's dollars and with less than half the population. We spent the next three decades paying a lot of that debt down (at least not adding to it) only to watch it reach insane levels beginning in 1980.

Given our current debt burden combined with a lack of manufacturing base, I don't see how we can borrow our way out of this mess.

[FogerRox]

21. Not exactly, in 1936 Chevy set a record selling sedans, Louis Armstrong

has a best selling record, there was still progress to be made, but factories were starting to hum, New factories were being built.

By 1936, all the main economic indicators had regained the levels of the late 1920s, except for unemployment, which remained high. In 1937, the American economy took an unexpected downturn, lasting through most of 1938.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession_of_1937

[Odin2005]

33. The late 30's recession was the result of stupid fiscal discisions by Congress and FDR.

Most politicians didn't become true Keynesians until AFTER WW2. Politicians saw that the economy was starting to recover so they decided to cut spending and balance the budget. OOPS! That sent the economy back into recession.

[FogerRox]

24. Record sales

http://www.mainspringpress.com/victorsales.html

[Warpy]

25. The Depression had ended by 1941

and the economy would likely have continued to improve for most people had the war not nearly derailed it for four years.

Although the war accelerated the process mostly by using all the men who might have had a hard time finding work for the war effort, creating fuller employment and raising wages, remember that the consumer economy, the part that needed rebuilding, was derailed by the need of the war machine for the country's total production of steel, nylon, rubber, fuel, and many other items. Instead of meeting growing demand and growing the consumer economy, the war forced rationing. People who weren't in the military had more money in their pockets but noplace to buy much of anything with it. The economy pretty much stalled for the duration.

Republican revisionism always says the Depression was ended by the war. It's one of those Big Lie things they have repeated so often over the years that nobody much questions it. However, it is a lie.

[roamer65]

46. Delete.

[cabluedem]

53. Not true. Car sales were nil and the big fhree loved building war machinery.

[PufPuf23]

26. The election to me has been for sure WWIII or hopefully

maybe not with Obama.

Palin could be vaporized by a nuke and have a minute sensation of Rapture (BTW on the RaptureReady forum they are praying for God to smite McClain).

Our country and military are exhausted.
We are the biggest drain on natural resources per capita and most belligerant nation in the world; aliennating even smart, long term allies.

The voters are uninformed and distain intellectuals.

We have the most destructive arsenal ever created by mankind but probably at our most vulnerable in generations.

Not a good situation.

[girl gone mad]

27. We are on dangerous economic ground.

We have European style socialism for large corporations, but none of the socialism for workers (health care, public transportation, subsidized higher level education, etc.).

We've taken on massive amounts of debt at precisely the wrong time in history to have debt. Like you said, our manufacturing base has eroded. We've sold decades of trade secrets and proprietary technology and to China in exchange for cheap labor.

The credit bubble grew out of a decline in real wages. People became dependent on credit to pay for things they wanted, and eventually even for the things they needed.

I don't see a way that we can avoid having a significantly reduced standard of living.

[dhpgetsit]

28. I don't believe it.

The new deal is what REALLY did it. We just have to commit to investing in people and infrastructure.
We need to recognize that the "trickle down" theory has created a decline in the middle class, and a "bottom-up" strategy is what it will take to reverse the trend.

[trthnd4jstc]

30. An Idea to reframe our economy.

The Fascists ran most of the good jobs out of the US, and kept the tax breaks for off-shoring US industries, how about a new economic system.

We could have a monetary system based upon Labor, and not credit, http://www.siue.edu/~rblain/index.htm,
We could have a socialist system of economy based upon self-sufficiency, instead of selfishness and greed.

We would not be rich, but we would not be poor. We could survive at least.

We have to look forward. The Fascists have done such a terrible job of destroying the US economy that we have to deal with the world as it is, not as we want it to be. The world is changed. Now the Chinese are on the Advent. They have the manufacturing, not us. We need to work with each other in order to have any sort of world.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

31. That's exactly right, SoCalDem

I regularly translate Japanese government and corporate reports, and 45 years after the Minamata mercury poisoning case, they are miles ahead of us in environmental consciousness. Everything I translate is about how this company reduced its emissions or learned how to make useful products out of scraps that it used to throw away or has adjusted its thermostats or has invented new, energy-saving versions of its existing products or has invented brand new products. Meanwhile, Japan is expanding its famous system of "bullet trains" and has a maglev line planned that will eventually open a second route between Tokyo and Osaka.

Britain has been damaged by Thatcherism in the same way that the U.S. has been damaged by Reaganism, but they still have a far better rail and intercity bus system than we do, the former homeland of bad cooking is so into fair trade that you can buy fair trade chocolate and nuts in rural train stations and so into vegetarianism that every lodging I booked at offered vegetarian and vegan versions of the standard English breakfast. Their National Health Service, while still troubled, still saves people from bankruptcy by hospital bill.

Open the Scientific American and see how all the European and Asian countries are trying to recruit American-trained scientists.

Then we read of the South American countries that are banding together to stand up against U.S. interference in their internal affairs.

The world is leaving us behind. People like me who are anti-war and anti-intervention are often derided as "isolationists," but who are the real isolationists? I say they're the ones who act as if we have nothing to learn from other countries. But how would most Americans know whether we have anything to learn? They've never traveled and have no interest in doing so.

I was recently reminded of the Working Holiday Visa, a program in which people under 30 can go work in another country for 6 months to a year without any normal visa restrictions. Most Americans have never heard of it, because the U.S. doesn't participate, but Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the U.K., Ireland, France, Denmark, Japan, and South Korea do. Why doesn't the U.S. participate? Who knows? Maybe the powers that be don't want young Americans stripped of their illusions about living in "the greatest country in the world."

[Raksha]

38. You're right - the American exceptionalists

are the real isolationists.

[Celeborn Skywalker]

55. It's sad.

I wish we could get a politician with the same views as Kucinich elected in this country. We would then be on the road to a truly fair society. As it is, we have politicians like Barack Obama who is considered "left" in this country but is, in reality, center-right by most objective standards (I'm going to vote for him because he is light years better than Mccain). At the very least, we should have a national health system and a guaranteed living wage. Unfortunately, even those two things are considered radical by the politicians in this country.

[Odin2005]

34. We need a "war" on global warming and dependency on oil. n/t.

[4 t 4]

36. CNN (the new Fox)

actually this bill may do Nothing to help the average American to stopped being foreclosed on. Well well what a friggin surprise. Back peddling is starting already and it's only been one day. We have been scammed once again also they said Bailout full of pork. How surprising. No help for credit card holders.

[unblock]

35. strictly speaking, the great contraction (as economists call it) ended in 1933

economists date the great contraction from 1929-1933.
after that, the economy started expanding again, thanks to huge new deal expenditures. fdr quite literally got this country working again.

http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/TableView.asp?SelectedTable=1&ViewSeries=NO&Java=no&Request3Place=N&3Place=N&FromView=YES&Freq=Year&FirstYear=2007&LastYear=2008&3Place=N&AllYearsChk=YES&Update=Update&JavaBox=no

some people are dismissive of the economic boom from government expenditures, and argue that the "real" economy wasn't expanding, only the public economy was. yet these same people insist that the real boom was from the war, which was also, obviously, the result of huge government expenditures. moreover, they're wrong in this case, because the private sector was greatly expanding from 1933 on, having been decimated by hoover.

there was a severe recession in 1938. that, plus the politics of fdr, further the notion that the economy was still contracting.



also note that if you lost everything through 1933, then got a job earning much less than you were used to, you probably felt like you weren't back to where you "should be" even if your situation was improving each year.

[Froward69]

41. you aid what i awas going too

my father told me he had spent 30-38 out of work. in '38 he got a job. by 41 he had a car and was looking to get married... then he enlisted in '42.. medical discharge in '44 and never stoped working until retirement in 85.

republicans believe depression is staved off by War production. it's not, it is staved off by creation of JOBS! in ALL fields.

[tama]

39. Ehm

as for historical accuracy, even though much of Russia was occupied, it was on the Eastern front where the war was decided and where Russia won - having moved industrial production beyond Ural. West was small sideshow.

[arcadian]

40. It's also why we're stuck with the MIC right now.

It'll be with China probably, war that is.

[XOKCowboy]

43. We still.have the manpower...

and the need for infrastructure renovation and alternative energy construction to employ hundreds of thousands. We could use a WPA-type program right now. We also need a government that looks out more for the family than corporations.

[Bigmack]

44. Larger population in the US...

no manufacturing base, peak oil, climate change, crushing debt, horrible balance of payments.... and more like this. I think we're much worse off. That's the long version.

Short version... We had oil, then.

It's gonna take oil to switch to alternatives, since it takes oil to make new technology.

I'm not saying we can't do it, but I think it's going to be a tougher slog.

A country that owes as much as we do and still spends a Trillion bucks a year on the military (includes black ops and R&D and nuke stuff) is really hurtin'.

[RoyGBiv]

45. Let me say it plainly ...

I mean no disrespect personally, but this is a right-wing lie meant to discredit the social and economic reforms FDR put in place. It's a well calculated lie too. As one economist put it, the hole was so deep, we didn't get back to zero for a long, long time, and that leads to the idea that the depression itself lasted up to the beginning of WWII.

It's not true.

The economy began expanding in earnest around 1936, after FDR's so-called Second New Deal came into play. In reality things had started to improve in bits and spurts as early as '33 but only after a massive barrage of legislation, some of which helped, some of which didn't. FDR was trying anything and everything to help put a fire into the economy. What worked, he kept. What didn't, he let go.

[SoCalDem]

49. Coming out of a "depression" is largely psychological, and people all over the US

did not FEEL like they were "out of the depression" until they saw those factories humming again, and until everyone who WANTED a job, could GET one.. a GOOD UNION job..

That did not happen until the war production started in a big way..

The pencil pushers, policy-wonks and politicians can show us on paper how the depression ended in '33, or '36, or '39, or '41, but until the war was over, and the returning soldiers all had jobs to come back to, the depression mentality was still with us..

Years of depression, the dust bowl years, the decade of deprivation lingered in small town America and rural America, long after the New Deal and the PWA had laid the groundwork..

I don't go around reading "rightwing propaganda", so I'm not sure why you are insinuating that MY own ideas, based on what I have read and heard from my own family members, is somehow invalid, because I do not think that the depression ended as FDR put pen to paper on the New Deal ...:P

The New Deal was INVALUABLE in ending the depression, because it gave people some real hope, and it did address most of the tourbles we had as a nation, but the "depression mentality" did not end until the war came along..

Public Works Administration

Created by the National Industrial Recovery Act on June 16, 1933, the Public Works Administration (PWA) budgeted several billion dollars to be spent on the construction of public works as a means of providing employment, stabilizing purchasing power, improving public welfare, and contributing to a revival of American industry. Simply put, it was designed to spend "big bucks on big projects."

Frances Perkins had first suggested a federally financed public works program, and the idea received considerable support from Harold Ickes, James Farley, and Henry Wallace. After having scaled back the initial cost of the PWA, FDR agreed to include the administration as part of his New Deal reforms.

More than any other New Deal program, the PWA epitomized the Rooseveltian notion of "priming the pump" to encourage economic growth. Between July 1933 and March 1939, the PWA funded the construction of more than 34,000 projects, including airports, electricity-generating dams, and aircraft carriers; and seventy percent of the new schools and one third of the hospitals built during that time. It also electrified the Pennsylvania Railroad between New York and Washington, D.C. Its one big failure was in quality, affordable housing, building only 25,000 units in four and a half years.

The PWA spent over $6 billion, but did not succeed in returning the level of industrial activity to pre-depression levels. Nor did it significantly reduce the unemployment level or help jump-start a widespread creation of small businesses. FDR, personally opposed to deficit spending, refused the spend the sums necessary to accomplish these goals. Nonetheless, the historical legacy of the PWA is perhaps as important as its practical accomplishments at the time. It provided the federal government with its first systematic network for the distribution of funds to localities, ensured that conservation would remain an element in the national discussion, and provided federal administrators with a broad amount of badly needed experience in public policy planning.

When FDR moved industry toward war production and abandoned his opposition to deficit spending, the PWA became irrelevant and was abolished in June 1941.

[RoyGBiv]

50. I'm insinuating nothing ...

I said, clearly, I did not mean that personally. If you choose to take it personally, I'm sorry for that.

The idea that ending a depression is largely phsychological is not an untrue sentiment on its face, but it leaves out the most important factor of what affects the psychological component, to wit, a reality strong enough that it can be trusted. There is an economic reality to this, and it indicates that the Depression as a matter of economic reality was essentially over by mid-way through FDR's second term. But there had been upswings before, even while Hoover was still in office, but those upswings were not sustained and the fundamentals remained extremely volatile and depressed. When the recovery was sustained for some time, when the fundamentals were stable, when the march toward the previous baseline began in earnest, that's when people started to notice. That is, people have to feel things are getting better, and the time at which they began to feel this coincided with the year or two prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

WWII was a game changer to be sure, but it was not what "really" ended the Great Depression. (In fact it threatened to undo everything FDR had done and send us plunging again.) You are proposing a counter-factual wherein the Depression would not have ended without the onset of WWII. WWII accelerated industrial output for the war machine, at the expense of non-war-related industry, and ironically enough, that has a lot to do with where we're at today. In other words, even granting your psychological profile of the Depression, the nation was on a clear path to that psychological recovery before the US entered the war at all. Indeed this was one of the motivators for many to remain so sternly isolationist and one of FDR's greatest problems in trying to aid Europe.

As for your own ideas, you didn't just create those ideas out of the ether. They are influenced by what you've learned -- read, seen, heard, etc. The idea that WWII "fixed" the depression has been inculcated into the culture through popular texts going all the way back to our high schools, which have themselves been influenced heavily by the Friedman school of economic thought. High school texts especially, going back to the 50's, were strongly influenced by conservative historians and political scientists. The dominant theme has been to nay-say the kinds of heavy government expenditures FDR put into place *except* as it fuels the military industrial complex.

[femrap]

47. The entire planet has to stop polluting

using every last resource our planet has to offer. I'm glad I didn't reproduce...I would be even more nervous over the future.

Will we stop destroying the planet? 12-21-12....The beginning of a new age and the end to the machismo and violence. Sure hope the Mayans and Hopis were right!

[roamer65]

48. Increased war production during 1940 and 1941 helped bring us out of it.

We produced a lot of war materiel for the UK and the Soviet Union during those years under what eventually became the Lend-Lease program. We were also rearming our own forces because as my older relatives said, "The handwriting was on the wall that we'd be in the war at some point".

In today's terms, Lend-Lease spending was around 700 billion dollars for 1941-1945. A very large economic stimulus.

[JerseygirlCT]

51. Yup. I've been thinking about that, too.

And afraid that some people will see the answer in a new war.

[Kip Humphrey]

54. Fighting fascists around the world in their first bid for world domination. ...hmmm

[Joe Fields]

57. Technically, that is incorrect.

As you mentioned, many goods and services during the war were either off-limits or rationed to the citizenry.

It wasn't until after the war, when the housing boom was created and consumables were once again manufactured; items such as washers and dryers, toasters, ovens, beds, etc. which were now on the market and in hot demand, that the economy took off.