Editorials & Other Articles
In reply to the discussion: It's time to defund the Republican Party [View all]BobTheSubgenius
(11,563 posts)I guess I actually am, as opposed to "would." Just the concomitant redistribution of wealth would make a huge difference, let alone the long term effects.
Just one quibble, though. So many people hearken back to the golden times of 1950 to 1980, or whenever you stop counting. The post WW2 world had never even been glimpsed before, let alone existed.
Almost HALF of all goods manufactured in the world were made in the US. The vast majority of privately-owned telephones and automobiles were owned by the American public.
America ramped up production to an astonishing degree in WW2, and made a mind-boggling number of airplanes, tanks, ships and the like. Turning that capability to non-military uses was completely unprecedented.
Europe, from the Spanish border to the east edge of Poland was in various stages of destruction - Britain's Empire unravelled, France, the lowland countries and Italy were heavily damaged, and Germany was all but flattened.
Russia turned its attention not to competing economically with the US, but securing buffer territories to blunt aggression from the West. If you look at Russia's history, it's not hard to see why they did that.
The US had no real competition to speak of for several years after the war, and things were so lop-sided and desperate that American leaders felt compelled to mitigate the suffering of the people, and help level the field at a national level to hopefully forestall another Fascist rise, or a big swing to the left.
These are conditions that will hopefully never be duplicated, or even approached.