DAVE | 2007-02-24
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The Greatest Generation "models" contributed little. Their "corporate form" had to be undone in the 1980s to get improvement in America's productivity.
The Greatest Generation was one of the most unproductive generations in history, the proof being the great inflations of their working lives (1940s through early 1980s), inflation representing nothing more than a shortage of consumer goods, the opposite of what the MSM tell us.
The Greatest Generation was good at getting others to pay their bills. That's over, and that fact that we are stuck with their bills is the biggest economic problem we have.
Comment by Dave —
ME:
Yes, we are STILL paying for WWII and those benefits. I tried to introduce this into the economics literature, and you can imagine the reaction I got.
Back in the 1960s I added up the costs of the DEBT from World War II, just the war, not the veterans' benefits still being paid. The war had been paid largely by debt. But that debt had been racked up over twenty years before. The INTEREST on the debt had more than doubled it.
Ever since 1945, the Federal Government had routinely run a deficit. But if you subtracted the interest on the debt from World War II from that deficit, outgoes and income were equal. In other words, our ENTIRE debt came from WWII. It has not been paid.
Now WWII and its debt are in their SEVENTH decade. Would you care to do a little arithmetic and figure what the geometric progression has made it NOW? PLUS the debt we ran up paying those benefits to twelve million "vets."
Giving a third of the world's population to Stalin and Mao was an expensive proposition.
Besides which, since we had destroyed the Anti-Cominterm Axis -- the word before "Axis" has not been pronounced in many, many years -- we spent most of the Federal budget defending against a threat Germany and Japan were no longer there to resist.