Fiz > The US went financially bankrupt in 1971, Zim, or close enough that only a deal with the devil stopped catastrophic and immediate public collapse. Do you remember when Nixon closed the gold window to the rest of the world? Its significance was mostly downplayed in the nightly news, but THAT WAS A FORMAL DECLARATION TO THE GOVERNMENTS AND BANKERS OF THE WORLD THAT THE US WAS INSOLVENT.
Was it? Or was it a realization that for the U.S. to maintain a 'gold standard' with the three horses of the apocalypse (Inflation, deficit spending, and the rest of the world NOT playing the same game) would have surely crushed America if we didn't withdraw form the 'gold standard'?
There is a lot of truth in what you typed . . .
But do realize that America did not have the 'material shortages' and rationing seen during WWII. America's grocery stores still had plenty of food all through and after Vietnam.
What was the real cause of the high inflation of the late 1970's and early 1980's? A trifecta of massive deficit spending programs.
Kennedy's 'Man on the Moon'. On the one hand I like the space program, but spending ourselves into bankruptcy to achieve the goal? On the other hand the space program had a LOT of spinoffs and improvements in technology leading to improvements in our standard of living and more cost effective ways of doing things. (Among them smaller computers for space craft led to the personal computer of today.)
Johnsons Vietnam War. Wars always improve technologies and enhances productivity. The Civil War brought U.S. a massively increased railway system and a telegraph system. WWI begat truck making factories to mechanize America. WWII radar for doppler weather radars. Vietnam and those nightingale air ambulances. The lists go on and on. Was War to get those improvements worth it? Dunno but I have no problem letting other people make up their own minds.
And Johnsons 'War on Poverty'. Massive welfare spending which amounted to pouring money down the toilet.
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Welfare vs. Defense, By the Numbers
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/welfare-vs-defense-numbers-kevin-d-williamson/
October 9, 2015
A few more thoughts on the view from 1957. Relative to the size of the U.S. economy (which is to say, as a share of GDP) we have cut military spending to barely a third of what it was in 1957, from 9.8 percent of GDP then to 3.3 percent of GDP now. Even though we were spending three times as much on national defense in 1957—and even though we had lower taxes (17.2 percent of GDP then vs. 17.7 percent of GDP today) we ran a budget surplus. It’s usually described as a “modest” surplus, but at 3.4 percent of GDP, the budget surplus of 1957 was proportionally larger than military spending is in 2015.
So, where’d the money go?
Feel free to consult the historical data yourself, but the short answer is: welfare spending.
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Recap: In GDP terms, we spend about a third on the military today compared to what we spent in the late 1950s. We spend almost exactly the same on interest on the debt. We spend 20 percent less on energy, transportation, the environment, and natural resources. And we spend almost four times as much on welfare. Again, that is in GDP terms, and our economy is a heck of a lot bigger than it was in 1957. As a share of all federal spending, welfare has gone from 23 percent of spending to 73 percent of federal spending. In constant-dollar terms, we spend 17.5 times as much. In nominal-dollar terms, we spend 150 times as much.
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Zim.
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