That would not be possible today. The wartime World War Two economy we learn about in school was only made possible because of two factors: 1) A massive surge

That would not be possible today. The wartime World War Two economy we learn about in school was only made possible because of two factors: 1) A massive surge in federal government spending, financed by borrowing from public markets (incl. war bonds), to buy the materiel needed to fight a war on two fronts (in Europe against Germany and in the Pacific against Japan). Such spending caused the public debt as a share of GDP to surge to its highest historical level ever, from about 40% at the start of the war to 100% at its peak, as you can see on this graph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/US_Debt_Held_by_Public.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/US_Debt_... . Today, without such a total war effort, we are running trillion dollar deficits. To put it as shortly and bluntly as I could, trying the same thing today would bankrupt the government. Our debt levels are far higher than they were then, in relative terms, and increasing by over a trillion every year. We would be looking at 2 or 3 trillion dollar deficits. Deficits of that magnitude might shake investors' confidence in the U.S.'s ability to service its debt. 2) The United States was coming out of the Great Depression, and the unemployed labor pool was in the double digits, as you can see on this graph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/United_States_unemployment_with_incarceration_1892-2016.png/450px-United_States_unemployment_with_incarceration_1892-2016.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/Un... . In other words, there were a lot of unemployed people with nothing to do who could quickly be put to work to produce stuff for the war economy. This is not the case today. The economy is running at full employment. The large spare labor pool that existed then doesn't exist today.