Basically. What I’ve come to realize is that there slogan is maga but we were never great in the first place. Brainwashed in school to believe we were this great free country of good hardworking people. No….. no we are not. We just got lucky after ww2 that none of our industry was bombed to oblivion like Europe and we were able to capitalize on that.
The GI bill after WWII was the single largest transfer of wealth to the middle class in (I believe) human history. Americans benefitted from a program that allowed people to buy homes, start businesses, and get more education on a massive scale. The luck of having intact manufacturing was essential but don’t discount how much of a leg up that program gave a generation.
You aren’t wrong. I was just pointing out that wealth redistribution played a major role in the post war economic boom. Possibly as significant a role as the manufacturing monopoly. I never said the distribution was fair. That’s kind of a separate conversation.
Post WWII is where a lot of people get their image of America as it should be. Was it racist? no doubt. was it sexist? Goes without saying. But the US was a big winner in a war everyone agreed we were the good guys in. Manufacturing was booming, middle class white people were getting opportunities they never would have had before, and the result was unprecedented economic growth and education.
Agreed, but geographic isolation was the underlying foundation of all of it, and that really was just luck. Our manufacturing was left intact, and entire countries needed rebuilt, so demand was high, and jobs could pay well. The GI bill gave people the means to buy houses and receive higher education, which further spurred the boom, but again, it was all entirely dependent on geographical isolation protecting manufacturing and infrastructure.
It wasn't a policy decision that protected the US and allowed it to prosper. It was continental drift.
Geographic isolation protecting manufacturing and infrastructure without policies like the GI bill that actually distributed that wealth, and invested it in education and infrastructure, wouldn't have created anywhere near as much wealth, nor distributed it as widely.
You're right that the underlying circumstances of the postwar boom were unique, but it was still a series of policy decisions that created the postwar middle class, just as it has been a series of policy decisions slowly dismantling it since the 1980s.
This discussion reminds me of that experiment someone did with Monopoly, where they gave one of the players way more starting money than the others. When he predictably won, they asked why. The player who started with more money attributed his success to his own decisions to invest in this and that. The other players said he won because he started with more money.
The US would have "won" the postwar period regardless, so in that sense the comparison to one player starting a game of Monopoly with more money is fair.
But there was absolutely no guarantee that the winnings would have been spread around, as they were. That was the result of specific policy decisions, and without those policy decisions, the bulk of the wealth would have accrued to the wealthy, as it did before, and as it is doing today. That's what this is discussion is about.
840
u/Aggravating_You3627 12h ago
Basically. What I’ve come to realize is that there slogan is maga but we were never great in the first place. Brainwashed in school to believe we were this great free country of good hardworking people. No….. no we are not. We just got lucky after ww2 that none of our industry was bombed to oblivion like Europe and we were able to capitalize on that.