On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 21:00:05 -0400, Gary Coffman
wrote:

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 14:31:13 GMT, "Ed Huntress" wrote:
"Gary Coffman" wrote in message
. ..
On Sun, 12 Oct 2003 20:14:25 GMT, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:
The US economy since WWII has been built on an
underworked, overpaid middle class. May they rise again.

The reason for that was that at the end of WWII the US was the only
major industrialized nation left with an intact infrastructure. The rest
of
the world was either smashed flat, or was made up of remnants of a
colonial infrastructure which held them to peasant level. So the US
could allocate resources profligately without enduring any negative
consequences.

I'm real curious about why you think that should have led to such a big
social and economic change in the US. What's your rationale? With numbers,
please. No fuzzball theories. g

I just told you why. The US had no effective economic competition
at the end of WWII. US companies could sell everything they could
make. They didn't have to care much about costs or quality. If the
unions wanted more money, fine, they gave it to them to keep the
wheels turning and the profits rolling in. The US was top of the heap,
the men in the grey flannel suits had the world by the tail and could
do no wrong. Coca Colonialism was in full swing, and there was
little the rest of the world could do about it.

The Red Menace also fueled the fire. The taxpayer would fork over
inordinate amounts of money to defend against it, and government
borrowed even more. Huge industries, which would have otherwise
withered at the end of the war, fed off that paranoia and bellied up
to the federal trough to feed. All that money circulated through the
economy, driving it even further and faster.

I liked to add the following:
Not only did all of the above conditions exist, but the US had at that
point a state-of-the-art manufacturing base and transportation system
(railroads) that had been both funded by war bucks and been brought to
a high rate of production by war demands.

None of this is fuzzball theory-the difference in ton-miles any given
railroad posted pre and post war is staggering, but the example most
often given is the Pennsylvania Rail Road alone moved as much material
in 1942 as every US road _combined_ did in 1939.

-Carl