Does anyone believe that WAR is the best solution for an ailing economy?

[Hugabear]

I've heard this many times in the past. In fact, I've had teachers and professors teach that it was WWII that pulled us out of the Depression, not FDR and his New Deal policies.

Now I don't expect any sane person here on DU to agree with this - but do THEY agree with this? Do the rethugs think that war is the best remedy for an ailing economy? If so, that might explain their recent belligerence towards Iran, Pakistan, and Russia. Do these assholes really think that we need another World War to pull us out of the coming Depression?

[fed_up_mother]

1. WWII contributed greatly to the economy

but anyone who takes us to war for that reason should be drawn and quartered.

Besides, our government wasn't drowning in debt at the start of WWII the way we are now.

[Cosmocat]

13. A couple of thoughts ...

1) First, WWII is seen as the crowning example. The thing is, "war" at that time was a lot more expansive. You needed A LOT of troops, who needed clothes, shoes, rations. There was more MASS production of weapons, guns, tanks, air planes. In some ways, it was a war of attrition, and was based in good part on being able to out produce the Germans.

"War" today, at least as the US is concerned, is 100 times less expansive. We need a fraction of the troops, and we need a fraction of weapons. Instead of mass producing 10 Sherman tanks, we use one Abrams. SO, FAR less jobs, and far less overall impact. At the same time, it costs JUST as much - the costs don't go into production as much, now far more goes into development, and the individual cost of high tech items.

2) War Profittering. WWII we had a president who outright said no one was going to get rich off the war, and Truman ended up being president in great part for PROSECUTING war profiteers. Conversely, companies and individuals have been making MASSIVE amounts of money off of war profiteering since then - witness the precient call out about the military/industrial complex. And, of course, Bushco has taken war profiteering to a level never imagined - the money, literally LOST in Iraq, BILLIONS, is just incomprehensible.

[fed_up_mother]

22. I agree with all your points.

[iceman66]

24. You can bet that John McCain does!

[rateyes]

2. Republicans will believe anything you tell them as long as it's wrapped

up in the flag and the "language of God."

Why else would they cheer McCain's calls for REGULATION of financial markets??

[TomInTib]

3. I remember being Home on Leave.

Maybe 1971.

I was at a party when some frat-boy cretin said to me, "Well, you gotta admit that Vietnam has been good for the economy".

Luckily, my friends got me out of there before the police arrived.

[hedgehog]

4. My very unique memory of 9/11: I was working at a steel mill

which was at the time subject of a strike. Out of all the management employees in maintenance, I alone was given a job in production, and the worst job in the mill at that, so you can get some notion of how I got along with people there. Any how, we were all called together for our daily rah-rah session, and I was appalled at the level of excitement that circulated through the crowd. Business had been bad, but everyone except me was convinced that we were going to war and that that meant that orders were going to skyrocket! Somehow it never occurred to those people that Defense spending has been on a war-time footing since December 7, 1941!



On edit: I call my experience unique because I have never heard anyone else describe people as being secretly excited and pleased by 9/11!

[dmallind]

5. DUPE sorry NT

..

[dmallind]

6. In all honesty

The war did help. That kind of war - that required wholesale mobilization of industrial resources, a desperate race to gain new technology against an equal or even possibly slightly superior technical ability on the other side and, macabre though it is, a significant reduction in ratio of workers to jobs due to fatalities - would probably help the economy in the long term now, but a) that's not the kind of war we're likely to have for the foreseeable future and b) even if it were, it's something beyond immoral and into downright evil to want to slaughter millions to tweak your GDP over the next decades, so I don't think even the RWers are really pushing that.

Most of them anyway.

But that doesn't mean they are entirely wrong about WW2 being a major economic stimulus in the following decade or two (although FDR's policies helped too - it's not a black and white thing). Just wrong if they think it's a good idea to do it again.

[bemildred]

7. Worked great for Germany in WWII, right?

War always sucks if you lose, and sometimes when you "win".

[dmallind]

9. Actually yep

They enjoyed the benefits of military technology investment and industrial mobilization too in the medium term aftermath. It stopped their rampant inflation and was much of the root of their late 20th Century industrial pre-eminence.

Compare Germany's economy in 1933 and 1951 - six years before and after.

Wars are never to be wished for, but to pretend that it is impossible for anything even remotely beneficial to occur due to them is blinkered by definition. It's like pretending that Hitler could not possibly have been nice to dogs or a reasonably skilled watercolorist because he was also a despotic loon. Not everything about a bad thing is always bad, and same for good things of course (Churchill for example was a chronic alcoholic).

I suppose I could be at risk of Godwin's law here, but since the topic of Hitler can be assumed to be intrinsic to WW2 I took a risk.

[bemildred]

25. Compare Germany's economy in 1933 and 1945, then we can talk. nt

[dmallind]

29. Why?

Do you think economic impact of such things is immediate? So Bush's tax cuts for the rich should have collapsed the economy in 2002 instead of now? So we should measure the economic benefits of internet technology (incidentally a product of military spending) one year after the first router was fired up and decide that's what it meant?

[bemildred]

31. LOL.

One might almost think you don't want to consider all points of view. Have you heard of the Marshall Plan? Can you offer some sort of argument that the state of the German economy in 1951 was caused by WWII, whereas it's state in 1945 was not? Do you think the German people in 1945 would agree that WWII really "fixed" their economy? Is it your view, with regard to the tens of millions of dead and hundreds of millions harmed by WWII, that "it's worth it" if the economy of Germany 6 years after the war was better than it was in 1933? I am doubtful that the German economy in 1933 was worse than it was in 1951, but I am quite sure it was better in 1933 than it was in 1945. So why should I think the war caused the situation in 1951 but had nothing to do with the complete destruction of the German economy in 1945? In what fantasy world is the complete destruction of your economy good for it?
:popcorn::popcorn:

[dmallind]

33. Projection redux

Please cite examples of my saying it's worth it. I can cite examples of exactly the opposite. Did you lie on purpose or make a mistake there?

The implicit assumption is that an event is all good or all bad. This is kindergarten level thinking. Major wars certainly create more harm than benefit, but it's asinine to say that there is no discrete benefit possible from wars.

German economy in 1933 to 1945? Depends on your metric. Inflation rates for example? Much much worse in 1933. But again this is way too simplistic. What earthly reason do you have for thinking that benefits should be immediate in a pulverized industrial landscape? Certainly nothing I said or claimed, so nothing I need defend.

[bemildred]

34. Now that is a great sentence:

"What earthly reason do you have for thinking that benefits should be immediate in a pulverized industrial landscape?"

Why, none at all. The benefits of a pulverized industrial landscape could indeed take a long time to manifest themselves, economically speaking.
:popcorn::popcorn:

[vaberella]

17. It wasn't the war that helped. It was the social ideology of fear

of your own and your existence that worked. Without that the successful military cohesive structure would never have worked. Look at what that did to Russia.

[Fresh_Start]

8. Riddle me this....if its so good for the economy

why are we in such straits right now. After all we've already got two wars going in the middle east?

Alternatively, I think that the trillion dollars in war spending hid the problems in the economy for much of Bush's term of office.
Imagine what the unemployment rate would have been without the war spending.

[fed_up_mother]

10. Because we owe our asses to the rest of the world. We're in too much debt!

We weren't in this much debt when WWII started, and we also didn't have war on the "homeland." Things were still being manufactured by actual human beings, so along with that came many new jobs.

THings were just very different then. Going to war now is just leading us into bankruptcy even faster, imo.

[dmallind]

11. DUPE sorry - NT

m

[dmallind]

12. Because it's not the same kind of war

Or frankly, even a real war in traditional terms. We are at "war" with a noun. We are not in a race for superior technology against Afghani warlords. We are not desperately increasing steel output and shipbuilding etc to keep up with losses against the mighty Iraqi insurgent fleet.

This kind of boondoggle is a drain pure and simple. It's not causing us to improve technology, boost output, or shift the labor force at all.

[vaberella]

19. That's the idea. Keep in mind for Repubs war works like Wall Street.

Some invisible hand comes and people start banding together under the bastardized notion of nationalism and reinvest in the society and production goes up and as usual things right itself.

Easier explanation.

War--> people working together and social conciousness of nationalism is built--> increases production and productivity ---> increases spending and consumption---> then we go back to war.

So when looking at the Capitalist structure it can't exist or function properly without war. Or a period of serious recession, low productivity and high unemployment which means War needs to be implimented in order to later have high consumption and high productivity.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

14. The economy wasn't that great after the war.

There was a recession in the early fifties too.

I think the idea that WWII made the economy better is a real canard.

[baldguy]

15. The United States has been at war for 70 yrs.

Why do you think half the federal budget goes toward "defense"?

[vaberella]

16. It's the neo-conservative view of the neo-liberalism mantra for capitalism.

War, war, and more war. It stimulates the economy. Read David Harvey's Neoliberalism book and you'll see what I mean.

[Venceremos]

18. During WW2

the production of weaponry, military uniforms, etc, was done in this country so it helped our economy. In our current economy, production of weaponry, uniforms, and just about everything else is outsourced to countries with the cheapest labor.

[vaberella]

21. Which the Repubs don't get which will inherently hurt us more the buffoons.

However, we do have a monopoly on bomb making and isn't Colorado the haven of defensive weaponry in times of war?

[anonymous171]

28. Correct. nt

[invictus]

20. nt

nt

[JuniperLea]

23. Not the way BushCo runs a war...

You have to look how WWII was run at home... everyone sacrificed, everyone worked toward the war effort, all the American engineering and manufacturing companies were given the contracts... nuff said.

Bush's war makes Blackwater and Halliburton's economy improve, as for the rest of us... well, you know.

[ramapo]

26. No question...and there is some truth to it

War creates need. Needs that are supplied by US companies. Many companies make tons of money through their defense contracts. No doubt these create jobs. And some get rich, very rich.

Now the same ends could've been/can be accomplished via peaceful projects that actually improve the lives of people and provide something for future generations. Alternative energy, mass transit, true urban renewal. The list is endless.

But only war gets a blank check. All the rest are just projects thought up by the liberal elites to spend MY money.

[anonymous171]

27. Not anymore.

[Iterate]

30. It’s an old argument, thoroughly refuted, but it keeps popping back up.

First of all the depression didn’t bottom out until 1934. By 1936, GDP had reached pre-crash levels, then stalled, then took off again.

The war caused a boom of course, but the reason for the boom was not expenditures on weapons and war goods technology (which have been shown to have a minor effect on economic growth), but on full employment at a good wage, investment in retooling for productivity, infrastructure, RND, and education (which all have a large multiplier effect).

The war itself caused massive dislocations in the demographics and housing, the money supply, waste, and pollution that we’re still dealing with today. Four years of commodity and price controls in the US, ten more in Britain. Having said that, there is little “GDP value” to the current way of making war –it just makes a big debt without growth.

It’s just another bogus way of casting doubt on social spending and full employment which post war conservatives were happy to see ingrained into our thinking.

And just on the face of it, the argument is silly: it means we should be happy we get to replace a city or two every hurricane season.

Your professors and teachers should take a sabbatical to get caught up on their reading.

[grantcart]

32. The economic activity of WWII was completely different than it is now

That is because it was an entire mobilization of the entire population to create a huge military force that created huge demands for increased manufacturing and services that eliminated unemployment and raised wages.

It served to rebuild America's manufacturing base, etc. War now uses high tech weaponary and a relatively small percentage of the population so the economic benefits are more of a drag than a boost.