I find the assumption that the WWII spending helped us. As in "Then, finally, geopolitical events took over, and World War II forced Roosevelt to spend as much

I find the assumption that the WWII spending helped us. As in "Then, finally, geopolitical events took over, and World War II forced Roosevelt to spend as much money as Keynes wanted. " In fact, our exports ramped up because the industrial capacity of the rest of the world was destroyed. Our economic golden era following the war was driven by exports- first selling military equipment to the UK, and then other industrial goods after the war as we were the one of the only places making anything. The money we gave to other countries to rebuild was spent on a lot of American goods. It's really the Chinese who are trying that approach, lending us money to buy their exports and then hopefully collecting the interest later (except we keep borrowing more money to pay the interest). At some point (now?) this starts to fall apart. One way is that we have massive inflation so that our future debts aren't worth much.