We are getting old.

[Mikebert]

(10-01-2016, 06:15 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(09-29-2016, 12:42 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(09-28-2016, 11:34 PM)Galen Wrote: Unfortunately when governments get into fiscal trouble of the scale the West has now they choose to go to war since people are more willing to sacrifice their interests in the name of blind patriotism.  Now western governments have nukes and so they need either a war against an indefinable enemy and no well defined victory condition.  If the War on Terror is insufficient then a civil war might do the trick.  The last thing a politician ever wants to do is admit that the promises of the past can not be kept since it threatens their career.

I actually agree that it's easier to sell the public on massive spending during wartime than for peaceful pursuits.  You seem to agree, so why is weaponized Keynesianism preferable to the same actions without the pretense?  We know that massive spending works to kick start the economy when it gets bogged down, and  we also know that growth and mild inflation makes the accumulated debt unimportant in the not too distant future: witness the dramatic change between1945 and 1973 on all the war debt that was never paid down by a single dime:

Those were also the best years the US economy and, more to the point, US workers have experienced ever!  We could do that again, focusing on building a 21st century infrastructure that we will need soon in any case.  Of course, the less progressive among us will argue that this needs to be a private sector undertaking, all evidence to the contrary.

Your memory is going if you think the "best years" of the U.S. economy included the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the massive spending of Johnson's and Nixon's economic keynesianism caused previously unheard of inflation.  While demand side keynesian stimulus can fund wars, in peacetime its record is terrible.

It should also be noted that outgrowing the WWII debt was composed of lots of population growth at nearly 2% per year, and quite minimal per capita economic growth and thus quite minimal improvement in living conditions for individual citizens.  The 1980s and 1990s, and even the early oughts, were considerably better for actual people.

The data are readily available.  Here are population growth rates and real per capita GDP growth rates over periods of interest.

Period . . . . . Pop . . GDPpc
1950-1965   1.7%  .  2.4%
1965-1980   1.1%  .  2.2%
1980-2000   1.1%  .  2.3%