red states rule
Senior Member
- May 30, 2006
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World War II
When World War II began in Europe in 1939, the size and scope of the federal government were much greater than they had been 25 years earlier, owing mainly to World War I and its peacetime progeny, the New Deal. Federal spending now equaled 10 percent of GNP. Of a labor force of 56 million, the federal government employed about 1.3 million persons (2.2 percent) in regular civilian and military jobs and another 3.3 million (5.9 percent) in emergency work-relief programs. The national debt held outside the government had grown to nearly $40 billion. Most important, the scope of federal regulation had increased immensely to embrace agricultural production and marketing, labor-management relations, wages, hours, and working conditions, securities markets and investment institutions, petroleum and coal marketing, trucking, radio broadcasting, airline operation, provision for income during retirement and unemployment, and many other objects.7 Notwithstanding those prodigious developments, during the next six years the federal government would assume vastly greater dimensionsin some respects its greatest size, scope, and power ever.8
During the war the conscript-based armed force, which ultimately comprised more than 12 million men and women, required enormous amounts of complementary resources for its housing, subsistence, clothing, medical care, training, and transportation, not to mention the special equipment, arms, ammunition, and expensive weapons platforms that now included tanks, fighter and bomber aircraft, and naval aircraft carriers.
For the Treasury, World War II was 10 times more expensive than World War I. Many new taxes were levied. Income taxes were raised repeatedly, until the personal income-tax rates extended from a low of 23 percent to a high of 94 percent. The income tax, previously a class tax, became a mass tax, as the number of returns grew from 15 million in 1940 to 50 million in 1945.9 Even though federal revenues soared from $7 billion to $50 billion between 1940 and 1945, most war expenses still had to be financed by borrowing. The publicly held national debt rose by $200 billion, or more than fivefold. The Federal Reserve System itself bought some $20 billion of government debt, thereby serving as a de facto printing press for the Treasury. Between 1940 and 1948 the money stock (M1) increased by 183 percent, and the dollar lost nearly half its purchasing power.
The authorities resorted to a vast system of controls and market interventions to get resources without having to bid them away from competing buyers in free markets. By fixing prices, directly allocating physical and human resources, establishing official priorities, prohibitions, and set-asides, then rationing the civilian consumer goods in short supply, the war planners steered raw materials, intermediate goods, and finished products into the uses they valued most. Markets no longer functioned freely; in many areas they did not function at all.10
World War II witnessed massive violations of human rights in the United States, apart from the involuntary servitude of the military conscripts. Most egregiously, about 112,000 blameless persons of Japanese ancestry, most of them U.S. citizens, were uprooted from their homes and confined in concentration camps without due process of law. Those subsequently released as civilians during the war remained under parole-like surveillance. The government also imprisoned nearly 6,000 conscientious objectorsthree-fourths of them Jehovahs Witnesseswho would not comply with the service requirements of the draft laws.11 Signaling the enlarged federal capacity for repression, the number of FBI special agents increased from 785 in 1939 to 4,370 in 1945.12
Scores of newspapers were denied the privilege of the mails under the authority of the 1917 Espionage Act, which remained in effect. Some newspapers were banned altogether.13 The Office of Censorship restricted the content of press reports and radio broadcasts and censored personal mail entering or leaving the country. The Office of War Information put the governments spin on whatever it deigned to tell the public, and the military authorities censored news from the battlefields, sometimes for merely political reasons.
The government seized more than 60 industrial facilitiessometimes entire industries (for example, railroads, bituminous coal mines, meatpacking firms)most of them in order to impose employment conditions favorable to labor unions engaged in disputes with the management.14
At the end of the war most of the economic control agencies shut down. But some powers persisted, either lodged at the local level, like New York Citys rent controls, or shifted from emergency agencies to regular departments, like the international trade controls moved from the Foreign Economic Administration to the State Department.
Federal tax revenues remained high by prewar standards. In the late 1940s the IRSs annual take averaged four times greater in constant dollars than in the late 1930s. In 1949, federal outlays amounted to 15 percent of GNP, up from 10 percent in 1939. The national debt stood at what would have been an unthinkable figure before the war, $214 billionin constant dollars, roughly a hundred times the national debt in 1916.
The prevailing interpretation of the wartime experience gave unprecedented ideological support to those who desired a big federal government actively engaged in a wide range of domestic and international tasks. To many, it seemed that a federal government capable of leading the nation to victory in a global war had a similar capacity to remedy peacetime economic and social ills. Accordingly, in 1946 Congress passed the Employment Act, pledging the federal government to act as Americas permanent macroeconomic warden.
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=113
I can only think how the left would react if the government was censoring the troops letters and emails.
The left was outraged when Saddam was hanged - it was Bush's fault the poor man suffered
