The thing is, without the massive economic boon provided by those social programs, the US really wouldn’t have excelled the way it did. Wealth distribution was at an all time high. Laborers were becoming wealthy by going to work. Bell Labs was employing people to sit around and dream up problems to solve. The wealthiest 1% had about 8% of the wealth. Exports started steadily declining in the 1950’s, but the amount of new production was only going up. In 1966, exports declined nearly 2 billion dollars, and money spent building new factories was nearly 10 billion dollars.
Americans were consuming more of their own products. Post war production carried the US through about 1955, but to say that was the only reason the US did so well for 30 years after WW2 is really reductive and just plain wrong. It helped, but it’s far from the only cause and stopped being a factor pretty quick.
The thing is, without the massive economic boon provided by those social programs, the US really wouldn’t have excelled the way it did. Wealth distribution was at an all time high. Laborers were becoming wealthy by going to work. Bell Labs was employing people to sit around and dream up problems to solve. The wealthiest 1% had about 8% of the wealth. Exports started steadily declining in the 1950’s, but the amount of new production was only going up. In 1966, exports declined nearly 2 billion dollars, and money spent building new factories was nearly 10 billion dollars.
Americans were consuming more of their own products. Post war production carried the US through about 1955, but to say that was the only reason the US did so well for 30 years after WW2 is really reductive and just plain wrong. It helped, but it’s far from the only cause and stopped being a factor pretty quick.