The least fiscally responsible President of all time is Ronald Reagan.
FDR has entered the chat. His spending was astronomical by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, his spending was so wildly out of control that Keynesianism was basically invented to excuse the shit he pulled by claiming that the military spending (to be literally blown up) gets to be included in the Gross National Product, and that the economy therefore recovered by building billions of bombs and blowing the world up with them. To be clear, the spending was so out of control that FDR raised corporate taxes to 80%, seized literally everyone's gold, printed unheard of amounts of money, then had to get people to give even that back to him in the form of the old War Bond program, created wage caps for dozens of industries so that people couldn't even get money in the first place, tried to federalize or nationalize entire industries, created a Social Security program on top of that that took money out of people's wages before they even got to their wallets, and it was never even close to enough income for the government which had ballooned in size exponentially.
Luckily for FDR, he died and Truman got to face the brunt of not spending more money than existed. Truman lost re-election because of the 'recession' that was caused when he realized there was no more money to print on funding the war. Meanwhile, the actual economic productivity of the US was basically still just as bad as it was in 1933.
What recovered the American economy was ending that spending, and then basically demanding that the entire planet pay us in their gold bullion (and then spending their money... which is why DeGaule wanted it fucking back).
The biggest lie ever told is that war spending fixed the American economy. Not only did it not do that, it never could have. Think about it. How has my economic activity improved if take my life savings, and then borrower another life savings, and spend it all at the gun range firing at targets all day. Hardly any economic productivity can be gained from this. Yes I'm giving borrowed money to ammo manufactures, but economics is based the system of people continually benefiting from economic transactions that generate more economic transactions, and each one significantly improves each other person's life and makes them able to make more economic transactions. The economic productivity of guns isn't all that great, but the productivity of war is even more stupid because it means that you get to repeat the experiment, but in a two-way range. What is the economic productivity of 450,000 dead Americans? How does that boom an economy, and not shatter it for nearly a century. The American Civil War blew up government spending for both the Union and the Confederacy, and killed 2% of the population. Strangely, this didn't cause a massive economic boom period, but instead lead to a crippling of American society that would last 100 years from destroyed infrastructure, fatherless homes, crippled families, destroyed communities, and burned cities.
The only way guns can make you money is when you use them to steal other people's shit. It's the only way guns can actually pay for themselves, otherwise they are a permanent expense.
If you want to see just how little FDR actually did to improve the economy, take a look at Tik History's presentation on The Greatest Depression of 1946
Not compared to the loss of productive value by the entire re-orienting of the economy towards war production.
The best argument for war economies being productive is exactly what you said, but the Left can't tolerate the argument: trickle-down economics. It's the only actual argument where you say: "without the war, rocket science and electronics would not have developed as quickly as they did."
The issue is opportunity cost. How soon would those developments have taken place if you hadn't destroyed the productive capacity of 55 million people, and completely savaged an entire continent and almost every major city on it.
This is why war can be productive if you only engage in foreign wars to steal assets. It's actually why Hitler went to war in the first place: he could stave off the consequences of his inflation by increasing the assets in the German economy. Germany's domestic industrial capacity couldn't stave off inflation on it's own, so if it re-configured for military production and stole more than it could produce, then that counters inflation.... for a moment. ...
...
... Additionally if you remove millions of your own citizens from your economy, you will unburden the welfare state, and the lessens value in your economy can be transferred over to fewer people (who will be your political loyalists), masking the effects of your collapsing economy until the whole thing collapses all at once.
To a tyrant, the solution to a over-burdened welfare state and inflation is simple: kill your own people.
Gee, I wonder why the US is trying to start a war with Russia, while it's facing a major inflation problem and an out-of-control welfare state. Especially when Russia has some of the largest national gold reserves of any country.
FDR has entered the chat. His spending was astronomical by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, his spending was so wildly out of control that Keynesianism was basically invented to excuse the shit he pulled by claiming that the military spending (to be literally blown up) gets to be included in the Gross National Product, and that the economy therefore recovered by building billions of bombs and blowing the world up with them. To be clear, the spending was so out of control that FDR raised corporate taxes to 80%, seized literally everyone's gold, printed unheard of amounts of money, then had to get people to give even that back to him in the form of the old War Bond program, created wage caps for dozens of industries so that people couldn't even get money in the first place, tried to federalize or nationalize entire industries, created a Social Security program on top of that that took money out of people's wages before they even got to their wallets, and it was never even close to enough income for the government which had ballooned in size exponentially.
Luckily for FDR, he died and Truman got to face the brunt of not spending more money than existed. Truman lost re-election because of the 'recession' that was caused when he realized there was no more money to print on funding the war. Meanwhile, the actual economic productivity of the US was basically still just as bad as it was in 1933.
What recovered the American economy was ending that spending, and then basically demanding that the entire planet pay us in their gold bullion (and then spending their money... which is why DeGaule wanted it fucking back).
The biggest lie ever told is that war spending fixed the American economy. Not only did it not do that, it never could have. Think about it. How has my economic activity improved if take my life savings, and then borrower another life savings, and spend it all at the gun range firing at targets all day. Hardly any economic productivity can be gained from this. Yes I'm giving borrowed money to ammo manufactures, but economics is based the system of people continually benefiting from economic transactions that generate more economic transactions, and each one significantly improves each other person's life and makes them able to make more economic transactions. The economic productivity of guns isn't all that great, but the productivity of war is even more stupid because it means that you get to repeat the experiment, but in a two-way range. What is the economic productivity of 450,000 dead Americans? How does that boom an economy, and not shatter it for nearly a century. The American Civil War blew up government spending for both the Union and the Confederacy, and killed 2% of the population. Strangely, this didn't cause a massive economic boom period, but instead lead to a crippling of American society that would last 100 years from destroyed infrastructure, fatherless homes, crippled families, destroyed communities, and burned cities.
The only way guns can make you money is when you use them to steal other people's shit. It's the only way guns can actually pay for themselves, otherwise they are a permanent expense.
If you want to see just how little FDR actually did to improve the economy, take a look at Tik History's presentation on The Greatest Depression of 1946
Could it not argued that increase in applicable science during war could be useful later after the war?
Not compared to the loss of productive value by the entire re-orienting of the economy towards war production.
The best argument for war economies being productive is exactly what you said, but the Left can't tolerate the argument: trickle-down economics. It's the only actual argument where you say: "without the war, rocket science and electronics would not have developed as quickly as they did."
The issue is opportunity cost. How soon would those developments have taken place if you hadn't destroyed the productive capacity of 55 million people, and completely savaged an entire continent and almost every major city on it.
This is why war can be productive if you only engage in foreign wars to steal assets. It's actually why Hitler went to war in the first place: he could stave off the consequences of his inflation by increasing the assets in the German economy. Germany's domestic industrial capacity couldn't stave off inflation on it's own, so if it re-configured for military production and stole more than it could produce, then that counters inflation.... for a moment. ...
...
... Additionally if you remove millions of your own citizens from your economy, you will unburden the welfare state, and the lessens value in your economy can be transferred over to fewer people (who will be your political loyalists), masking the effects of your collapsing economy until the whole thing collapses all at once.
To a tyrant, the solution to a over-burdened welfare state and inflation is simple: kill your own people.
Tik History on Why HItler Started the War is a good partial example of why this logic lead to the Holocaust
Gee, I wonder why the US is trying to start a war with Russia, while it's facing a major inflation problem and an out-of-control welfare state. Especially when Russia has some of the largest national gold reserves of any country.