{"id":30014,"date":"2016-06-06T01:00:10","date_gmt":"2016-06-06T05:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=30014"},"modified":"2016-05-27T11:35:33","modified_gmt":"2016-05-27T15:35:33","slug":"qotd-what-really-ended-the-great-depression-in-the-united-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/06\/06\/qotd-what-really-ended-the-great-depression-in-the-united-states\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: What really<\/em> ended the Great Depression in the United States?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Great Depression was the worst economic crisis in U.S. history. From 1931 to 1940 unemployment was always in double digits. In April 1939, almost ten years after the crisis began, more than one in five Americans still could not find work.<\/p>\n

On the surface, World War II seems to mark the end of the Great Depression. During the war more than 12 million Americans were sent into the military, and a similar number toiled in defense-related jobs. Those war jobs seemingly took care of the 17 million unemployed in 1939. Most historians have therefore cited the massive spending during wartime as the event that ended the Great Depression.<\/p>\n

Some economists \u2014 especially Robert Higgs […] challenged that conclusion. Let\u2019s be blunt. If the recipe for economic recovery is putting tens of millions of people in defense plants or military marches, then having them make or drop bombs on our enemies overseas, the value of world peace is called into question. In truth, building tanks and feeding soldiers \u2014 necessary as it was to winning the war \u2014 became a crushing financial burden. We merely traded debt for unemployment. The expense of funding World War II hiked the national debt from $49 billion in 1941 to almost $260 billion in 1945. In other words, the war had only postponed the issue of recovery.<\/p>\n

Even President Roosevelt and his New Dealers sensed that war spending was not the ultimate solution; they feared that the Great Depression \u2014 with more unemployment than ever \u2014 would resume after Hitler and Hirohito surrendered. Yet FDR\u2019s team was blindly wedded to the federal spending that (as I argue in my 2009 book New Deal or Raw Deal?<\/em>) had perpetuated the Great Depression during the 1930s.<\/p>\n

FDR had halted many of his New Deal programs during the war \u2014 and he allowed Congress to kill the WPA, the CCC, the NYA, and others \u2014 because winning the war came first. In 1944, however, as it became apparent that the Allies would prevail, he and his New Dealers prepared the country for his New Deal revival by promising a second bill of rights. Included in the President\u2019s package of new entitlements was the right to \u201cadequate medical care,\u201d a \u201cdecent home,\u201d and a \u201cuseful and remunerative job.\u201d These rights (unlike free speech and freedom of religion) imposed obligations on other Americans to pay taxes for eyeglasses, \u201cdecent\u201d houses, and \u201cuseful\u201d jobs, but FDR believed his second bill of rights was an advance in thinking from what the Founders had conceived.<\/p>\n

Burton Folsom, “If FDR’s New Deal Didn’t End the Depression, Then It Was World War II that Did”, The Freeman<\/em><\/a>, 2014-12-26.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Great Depression was the worst economic crisis in U.S. history. From 1931 to 1940 unemployment was always in double digits. In April 1939, almost ten years after the crisis began, more than one in five Americans still could not find work. On the surface, World War II seems to mark the end of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,7,41,13,230],"tags":[866,106,217],"class_list":["post-30014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-history","category-quotations","category-usa","category-ww2","tag-fdr","tag-greatdepression","tag-rights"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7O6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30014"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30014\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30015,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30014\/revisions\/30015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}