Once you get your head out of your Red-baiting ass. It should have been clear from my remarks, but I'll say it over again, with details, real slowly.

After the war, fearful of a resumption of the pre-war depression due to a cutback in war production and millions of returning GI job seekers, the nation embarked on an orgy of consumer goods production. Everybody went to work making widgets, and everybody bought way more widgets than they needed. Of course, they couldn't afford to pay for the widgets, because no company (or country) can sell all its output just to its workers, they don't get paid enough, there is overhead to be considered.

So we sold widgets overseas, and actually loaned them money so they could buy them, to keep up our domestic production and growth. We had our banks print money (Republicans call it "finance")and we sold stock (that's how companies print money) and people went into debt slaking their widget lust, and companies expanded their widget production...all on credit.
Inflation? Who cares? it allows us to lower our future debt so we can borrow more now. That's how we paid for the war. Or at least, that's how we postponed paying for the war.

We pretty much ran the world in those days, so we got away with it. They had to pay our prices, and we got to buy their raw materials at prices we were willing to pay. That's called economic imperialism, but that's another story.

While we were at it, we gave our middle class all kinds of bennies, nice educational benefits, nice housing loans (jobs for the construction industry), everybody wanted a cushy job in an air conditioned office, and instead of upgrading our own steel mills, we sold new, efficient ones to the Japanese (on credit) while we let ours decay. Pretty much the same happened to our infrastructure, like our railroads and urban public transport. Only our highways flourished, because that was profitable for the oil and motor industries, and they lobbied the pols like crazy to make it happen. When the oil ran out, we went overseas for it. Hell, what are aircraft carriers for, anyway?

I freely admit the Democrats were behind a lot of these measures, because they wanted full emnployment and economic growth, but the Republicans loved them too, because they were very profitable--at least, in the short term. But since the end of the war, the American economy has been based on growth. We have to have growth to pay tomorrow for the money we have borrowed today. Without constant growth, the economy stagnates and stalls. This is what the economists and sociologists of the 60s warned us about, this kind of economics was unsustainable, and we ignored them. What did they know? They didn't know squat about bizness.

When we did borrow money, we did not spend anywhere near enough building the infrasturcture needed to support future growth, instead, it went into planned obsolescence, tail fins on V8s, a military capable of waging planetary war, and consumer goods that were supposed to demonstrate how prosperous and hard working and sexy we were.

And when we found it was cheaper to export jobs and make widgets overseas, we did that too, while our capitalist drones made fortunes doing each other's laundry, selling each other pizza, and giving each other haircuts, but not actually making anything.

So stop your whining. This country has been run EXACTLY the way the business community always wanted it run, by both Democrats and Republicans, and now the system is seizing up because we've spent the last 70 years wasting all our money and effort building cars and roads and suburbs, and fancy houses and appliances and furnishings to put in them. And we couldn't stop because we had to sell more and more of this crap every year to be able to get the collateral to borrow for next year's production and consumption of worthless crap.

I know you can't accept that, because you've bought into that program totally and now its left you sucking canal water, naked, with your hands in your pockets, along with most of the baby boom generation who thought it could disco forever. Well I didn't, and I'm not. I don't need to blame anybody else for my problems, least of all some international socialist conspiracy, or the predatory, greedy demands of our ruthless senior citizens.

I've seen this coming for a long time now and I made the appropriate choices a long time ago.

The hippies were right.