American history

"A chicken in every pot "

The end of World War II to the late 1960s was a golden era of American capitalism. President Kennedy passed the largest tax cut in history upon entering office in 1961. $200,000,000,000 in war bonds matured, and the G.I. Bill caused a well-educated work force. The middle class swelled, as did GDP and productivity.

The U.S. underwent a kind of golden age of economic growth. This growth was distributed fairly evenly across the economic classes, which some attribute to the strength of labor unions in this period - labor union membership peaked historically in the U.S. during the 1950s, in the midst of this massive economic growth.

In 1963, Lyndon B. Johnson became President upon Kennedy's assassination and was elected in his own right in 1964. Johnson considered the government as capable of creating a "Great Society", and began many new social programs to that end, such as Medicaid and Medicare.

However, controversy over the Vietnam War forced Johnson to step aside and brought an electoral victory for Republican Richard Nixon in 1968. The U.S. government financed much of private industry's research and development throughout these decades, such as the space program, and the military began funding R&D of ARPANET (which would become the Internet) in the late 1960s.

In 1968 and 1969, productivity growth climbed near the levels it had reached earlier in the decade, but this would not last.