Massive government spending lifted us out of the Great Depression...

It is argued that World War II lifted the US out of the Great Depression. But what was World War II if not a huge government spending program?

The spending just happened to go towards building military hardware and infrastructure. Had all that spending gone toward "the commons", imagine the kind of shining city on a hill this country would have looked like early in the 20th century....

on edit: two major differences between then and now --- (1)the US was an industrial powerhouse that enabled FDR to put people back to work relatively quickly whereas today the country is a shell of its once prior dominance in industrial capacity...
(2) the country then was relatively debt free as opposed to today where China holds the deed to Uncle Sam's house.

Let's hope it doesn't take that long this time.

after they've been closed since the 80s.

We don't have the heavy industry to anywhere near the degree we had then, and that is the basis for any economy. It will be a long slog pulling out of this one.

"But what was World War II if not a huge government spending program?"

Answer: it was a competition-destruction program. More than anything else we were in supreme economic position at the end of the war since we were the only ones left with an intact industrial base. Almost the entire industrialized world, other than the US and Canada, was effectively destroyed. Having no competition is a fine economic position to be in.

The current "wars" we are "fighting" are huge government spending programs also, but strangely enough they did not produce economic nirvana...

but your point about the current "wars"...it HAS produced economic nirvana for companies like Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater and the like.....and the huge spending has been to over-inflated, cost plus, sweetheart deal, no-bid contracts....

I don't think a World War II type of "full-production" of war material program would necessarily employ the same amount of people today as it did back in the 1940's. Worker productivity and manufacturing technology has advanced exponentially since then.

But my original point was that World War II lifted the US out of the Great Depression because it was a massive government spending program that put people back to work on a grand scale. If the same motivation and effort were to be put forth in a civilian infrastructure format, the results would be the same if not better.....

is nirvana for those involved, but not for the economy as a whole, and not on the net for most of the population. What we need is not to pour money over everything in the hopes that will make everything better (and it won't), but consequences for wrongdoing. The people who profited from this big pump and dump scheme called the economy ought to be subject to clawback, and the key figures prosecuted and punished severely. The people who bought more than they can pay for ought to lose their investments. People who had nothing to do with the problem should not be paying for people who made bad decisions. That is what the economy is waiting for.

In the absence of a complete totalitarian state, the ability of the public sector to effect change is going to be less than the ability of the private sector to do so. Along our current path, the rogue elements in the private sector are being rewarded for malfeasance, paid for by those who were not responsible for their actions. This is insane; it is unjust on the most basic level, and the fact that as a country we actually operate like this is the root of the problem. Normal problem solving process goes Problem->Analysis->Solution... this country's goes like Problem->Ignore it->Shit hits fan->Panic and make problem worse.

By any other name would smell as sweet."