Redux

Hey.I'm just trying to understand the opinion that WW II ended the Great Depression and not the New Deal....which is the argument many Republicans in Congress (and the talking heads) opposed to the stimulus bill are still making...but never documenting.

UG made the same claim earlier.

I would like to see some one of that opinion back it with wiith data or even a simple explanation of how WW II, rather than the New Deal, contributed to the GDP rising about 5%/year between '33 and ''37 (after 4 years of negative growth) and unemployment rate dropping about 3%/year between '33 and 37 (after rising to nearly 25% between '29 and '32).

Both the significant rise in GDP rise and significant drop in unemployment between '33 and '37 meant a fairly strong economic growth and a hell of alot of jobs created between '33 and '37 somehow..and it sure seems like a stretch to me to suggest it was as a result of a war that was 4-7 years in the future.

The one blip in the pre-war economic data is in '38, the year FDR cut spending.

IMO, the only case they can make is that WW II contributed to driving down the unemployment rate even further to what could be characterized as "full" employment.

I wonder how ready or capable the US would have been for a war industry build-up in '41 if the economy had continued the slide downward every year through the '30s as it did from '29 to'33..before the New Deal.