WW2 is an example of stimulus spending. It does not matter what the production was used for. What matters is money flew into the economy and the wealth of the citizens increased. Note of course that the wealth of the country is built from the bottom up. When the wealth is centered in the rich, the country suffers.
good thread: I am struck by how ell the USA economy absorbed the enormous cost of WWII (which cost about $11 trillion). And most of the war production was for stuff that had NO civilan value! take a Sherman tank -say it cost abot $100,000 (1945 dollars) to build. when hostilities ceased, it was just about worthless.
Somthe USA economy can tolerate a lot of deficit spending-imagine if what was spent on WWII was used to build houses, factories, roads!
Many of those factories were re-tooled for civilian use however. They took a tank factory and made it back into a truck factory. Boeing started making civilian models of military transport planes.
It also helped that Europe was destroyed, so we were able to use all of those nice, shiny factories to sell them stuff that they could not make.
Yup, this’d be a good decade to send a man to mars, and return him safely to earth. That’d create a lot of the types of jobs we want if America is to have any hope of retaining its superpower status.