The history nobody taught you — how the debt, the wages, and the gap got here, year by year.
Ford knew the Pinto’s fuel tank could kill people and ran the math anyway. Tobacco and Exxon ran the same play on a bigger scale: the company knew, the public didn’t, because the company made sure of it.
Lobbying firms in Washington went from 175 to nearly 2,500. But a funded campaign doesn’t win by itself — it wins when people vote against their own paycheck.
A confidential 1971 memo from a corporate lawyer, two months before his Supreme Court nomination, argued business had been too quiet. Almost everything it asked for got built.
The phrase predates the Depression by two decades. It became business gospel only once a strong union and a tight labor market gave workers somewhere else to go.
Eisenhower saw the autobahns in WWII and never forgot them. In 1956 he signed off on 41,000 miles of interstate highway — the largest public works project in U.S. history.
The GI Bill sent millions to college and backed millions of home loans. It built the suburbs almost from nothing.
Unemployment fell from 14.6% to 1.2% once the government spent at a scale nothing peacetime had approached. It proved the New Deal’s argument the expensive way.
The WPA employed 8.5 million people and built 651,087 miles of road. Paying someone to build a bridge isn’t the same as paying them to do nothing.
FDR’s bet: when private spending collapses, the government has to be the spender of last resort. FDIC, Glass-Steagall, Social Security.
No deposit insurance, a Fed that tightened instead of loosened, and a tariff war that cut world trade by more than half — a crash became a decade.