True Grit Farms":2m15jxnk said:
I was under the impression that everything was booming after WWII. Then JFK started putting the brakes on and it's progressively gotten worse. The rest of the history lesson I'll leave to those of you that study history.
ok, here it is. JFK was dead by 1964. He had little to do with it, except to order our military technology not be openly and freely exported without congressional oversight.
For North America, especially the USA, and to some extent, Australia, yes everything was booming. Pretty easy to have a great economy when all the rest of the world is in shambles and ruins, their infrastrctures and industry wrecked, bombed and burned. Across Europe, most of Asia, North Africa and the far pacific, no heavy industry left, no railways, no steel mills, no shipyards, no refineries, few seaports, no airports, no aircraft manufacturing, no automobile plants, and not many roads that could handle a passenger car anyway. The first 2 1/4 decades after ww2 were arguably the best economic times this country ever saw--we were exporting everything from plywood to steel, copper cable to concrete, to rebuild the rest of the world. North America was not the big dog on the porch--it was the ONLY dog on the whole block.
Douglas MacAuthor was a very popular leader, and had huge support in congress, and he had an undying love for the Japanese--he had spent a lot of years in Tokyo before the war. He was adamant, that Japan not be punished, and he helped mold the formula for post-war Japan, so it was a given, that we would rebuild Japan. Germany however, got no love, and it was determined by the victors, that they would suffer greatly for both their atrocities and being the primary belligerent of that war. Not only would we not rebuild them, the little industry they had left was to be disassembled by the Germans themselves and transported to other countries, never to be rebuilt to any thing close to prewar conditions. As one US Senator put it--"Till Christ himself returns". Tens of thousands of German citizens were corralled and transported to the Eastern bloc to reassemble and work in those relocated plants--pretty much slave labor.
US policy in post-war Germany from April 1945 until July 1947 had been that no help should be given to the Germans in rebuilding their nation, outside preventing mass starvation. That meant, we had to support the German populace as they slowly rebuilt their basic infrastructure, providing only the bare necessities. But for the rest of the world, our wartime manufacturing capacity was turned into one huge export plant. We had the skilled manpower, the plants, the roads, the railroads, and the shipping capacity, and jobs were plentiful all thru the 50s and the 60s.
Within a few years tho, it became apparent that it would be impossible for the rest of Europe to quickly rebuild without Germany being rebuilt too--not without the surviving countries spending huge amounts of $$ anyway, so in the late 40s, Germany began getting help to rebuild as well. Mostly the US was the economic beneficiary of rebuilding the East and the West. (I personally have always thought the whole of Germany should have been handed over to Joseph Stalin--he would have known what to do with them)
Fast forward to the early 70s, Japan had stopped making trinkets and cheap radios and had begun building and exporting real products, Germany and Europe right behind them, as the rest of the world caught up with US capacity. Gone, was the huge global market for all our goods, and our economy shrunk back closer to pre-war levels.