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What would be a more exciting topic for you?
What would be a more exciting topic for you?
I've never thought of that before.
My thesis was a requirement for a class on the economic history of N America, which was necessary for an honours degree. So it had to be something in that field. I wrote it on the recommendation of my prof. If I were to do it again, I'd probably do it on something like the effect of slavery on the economic development of the South.
I have a problem with that idea.[War is the ultimate government stimulus program.
War is the ultimate government stimulus program.
It wasn't just the pent up demand from WWII. It was also from the Great Depression the decade prior. You essentially had a generation of pent up demand that led to a huge consumer spending boom that lasted for decades.
War is the ultimate government stimulus program.
It wasn't just the pent up demand from WWII. It was also from the Great Depression the decade prior. You essentially had a generation of pent up demand that led to a huge consumer spending boom that lasted for decades.
War is the same as the "Broken Window Fallacy". It does not stimulate. Bush & Obama just set records for war spending & the economy & jobs declined the entire time. A WPA project is stimulating, builds wealth & advances civilization. War destroys wealth & civilizations.
War is the ultimate government stimulus program.
It wasn't just the pent up demand from WWII. It was also from the Great Depression the decade prior. You essentially had a generation of pent up demand that led to a huge consumer spending boom that lasted for decades.
War is the same as the "Broken Window Fallacy". It does not stimulate. Bush & Obama just set records for war spending & the economy & jobs declined the entire time. A WPA project is stimulating, builds wealth & advances civilization. War destroys wealth & civilizations.
But you are confusing two seperate terms by linking them with the term wealth. High assets do not neccesarily equate to high GDP. The goal of a strong economy is to produce as much as possible, not to have as much as possible. Having as much assets as possible is probably half about making people happ(personal assets) and half about growing GDP (business assets).
The factors that brought about and sustained the Great Depression are essentially the same as those which caused our current economic problems. Those factors are diversion of the Nation's wealth resources to a small segment of the population and the hoarding of that wealth. FDR imposed a progressive income tax with a 91% maximum rate and he redistributed the recovered wealth to the working class by creating much needed make-work programs, such as the WPA and the CCC, which repaired and vastly improved our national infrastructure. My own father was employed in these projects which enabled him to support his family through the Depression years.
It was a slow process but the distribution of that money to people who immediately spent it brought about the circulation a national economy needs to thrive and the end result was the period of phenomenal prosperity between the 40s and 80s which gave rise to the American Middle Class.
The beginning of the end of that economic energy came about when Ronald Reagan, the man from General Electric, introduced Reaganomics, the first symptom of which was the Savings and Loan scandal, and it's been downhill at an increasingly rapid rate from then on -- because what was sold to us as trickle-down economics has in actual fact operated to siphon-up the Nation's wealth to a small group of high-level scam artists. The only thing that will repair the damage done to the economy and put America back to work is to go after Wall Street and the Banks, investigate and prosecute the sonsabitches who have grown fantastically wealthy by all sorts of deviously fraudulent schemes, recover what was stolen via massive fines, and imprison those found guilty of malfeasance and fraud. And anyone who doesn't believe there has been a lot of that need only obtain and watch a video called Inside Job.
Your post was a gross oversimplification, and just plain wrong in the 3 areas you tried to tackle: causes for the depression, the 40's-80s "growth," and the period you refer to as "Reaganomics."
Period 1.The causes of the depression being unequal distribution of the wealth? Hardly. Read a few textbooks, and you'll see that the culprits were: the Feds easy-money policy which created the stock market bubble; the market crash; the Hawley-Smoot tariff; the Revenue Act of 1932; the massive government spending under Hoover and FDR, which displaced the private economy.
Your father would have been better off without all of these factors; then the depression would have been OVER years before, and he wouldn't have had to depend on the New Deal for his living.
Period 2. Redistribution of income thru taxation gave us "the period of phenomenal prosperity between the 40s and 80s which gave rise to the American Middle Class." You must be kidding, right? For one thing, you must not know that there were very real economic problems and recessions during that 40 year time period. Are you reallysaying there was no middle class before? Interestingly enough, it was the tax cuts and sound money policies of both JFK and Reagan that got us out of the recessions of their times.
Period 3. Your gross misreading of history continues. To believe that there was prosperity between the 40's and 80's that Reagan brought to an end is just plain wrong. Either you are uninformed or just lying. Have you never heard of the 11 year stagflation of the 1970s? Don't you remember it, or were you too young? Unemplyment, interest rates in the 20% range, long gas lines, the "WIN" buttons, etc.
It was Reagan who came in during the early 80s, and through tax cuts and a sound currency ENDED the period of stagflation that idiots like Nixon, Ford and Carter had presided over. THAT started the period of prosperiety, from the early 80's to 2008; the greatest period of sustained economic growth in modern history.
Sounds like you listen to economic conspiracy theorists at worst, MSNBC at best. But the real history is out there, if you cared to explore.
Bull.
As we moved toward an ideology driven 'free market' ONLY belief economically, and away from a mixed economy, the results have been disastrous.
Over the past half-century we have seen lower tax rates and less government interference. We have come a long way toward free enterprise from the proto-socialist policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Since the Kennedy Administration we have reduced the marginal tax rate on our highest incomes from the 91% that remained in effect from the 1940s into the mid-1960s (and a brief peak of 94% during World War II) to 28% in the 1986 tax code. Yet our economic growth has slowed.
Decade/Average Real GNP/per Capita GNP Growth
1960-1969 4.18% 2.79%
1970-1979 3.18% 2.09%
1980-1989 2.75% 1.81%
1990-1994 1.95% 0.79%
(Maddison, Monitoring the World Economy 1820-1992 p. .183, 197)
Despite our adoption of the most enlightened free market policies, our performance resembles that of a declining Great Britain in the late nineteenth century.
Free market apologists contend the closer we come to pure laissez faire, the better. But there is little evidence for even this position. The U.S. has come closer to laissez faire than most other countries, especially since the Reagan Administration. If free market policies are the best economic policies then we should have experienced the most robust growth in the world during this period. But this has not happened. We have been outstripped by our trading partners.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
War is the ultimate government stimulus program.
It wasn't just the pent up demand from WWII. It was also from the Great Depression the decade prior. You essentially had a generation of pent up demand that led to a huge consumer spending boom that lasted for decades.
War is the same as the "Broken Window Fallacy". It does not stimulate. Bush & Obama just set records for war spending & the economy & jobs declined the entire time. A WPA project is stimulating, builds wealth & advances civilization. War destroys wealth & civilizations.
Another important fact is that economics makes certain assumptions about human behavior that may or may not be true. Economics assumes that people will maximize utility. Many confuse utility with income. People can act differently during war than during peace. People will more likely volunteer to sacrifice themselves during war, for example. That applies to the economy just as it does to battle. People thus may be more willing to sacrifice for the good of the whole, ie pay higher taxes and work just as hard, during war than during peace.
It's easier to think that when not knowing what the gdp is. The gdp is measured in $, not %. Here's the GDP in $ (billions, chained 2005)
the US has earth's largest economy, with earth's largest GDP. In absolute terms, what other economy is growing faster ? In relative terms, larger economies grow more slowly, an observation made decades ago (% growth of real GDP decreases, with increasing GDP)As we moved toward an ideology driven 'free market' ONLY belief economically, and away from a mixed economy, the results have been disastrous....
If free market policies are the best economic policies then we should have experienced the most robust growth in the world during this period.
what about payments to tax lawyers ?People never paid that 91% tax rate. Tax rates have no effect on tax revenue. It is all about tax collection enforcement & loopholes. The rich don't pay taxes unless they want to.
It's easier to think that by not understanding the gdp which is measured in $, not %. Here's the GDP in $ (billions, chained 2005)
The depression began with the huge Smoot-Hawley tax-hikes in 1930 and continued with FDR's war on commerce, and it ended with the war changed to being against the Axis.
It's easier to think that when not knowing what the gdp is. The gdp is measured in $, not %. Here's the GDP in $ (billions, chained 2005)
The depression began with the huge Smoot-Hawley tax-hikes in 1930, continued with FDR's war on commerce, and it finally ended when the war on business was replaced with the war against the Axis.
It's easier to think that when not knowing what the gdp is. The gdp is measured in $, not %. Here's the GDP in $ (billions, chained 2005)
The depression began with the huge Smoot-Hawley tax-hikes in 1930, continued with FDR's war on commerce, and it finally ended when the war on business was replaced with the war against the Axis.
So your graph shows that FDR's war on business equated to a 75% GDP gain in 8 years? Are you suggesting we need more war on business? Or are you suggesting that a 9% GDP gain per year is bad?
Did I miss the point? Or did you make a really bad one?
