2020 Economic Adjustment: How Severe?

Agreed, but add to that the fact that the US was pretty much the only industrial nation that was not bombed out and physically devastated by the war. While everybody else was having to practically (if not literally) rebuild their industry from scratch, all we had to do was retool our factories which were already in very good shape from years of wartime production. As a result, we were able to dominate the global market. Now we have so many competitors.We used to be able to keep our manufacturing jobs within our country, which at first was almost a no-brainer since we pretty much had the only functional factories. Now most of those jobs have gone overseas where labor is cheaper.We also were operating under sane and more realistic economic models and policies (as far as those adjectives can be attributed to economics). Now since 1980 we're being afflicted with an insane and unrealistic economic model, "supply side", which is ruining the actual economy.And, to agree with RAZD in Message 18, we had strong unions who helped to contribute to strengthening the actual economy leading to the growth of the middle class, which in turn led to the growth of small businesses and all other segments of the economy. Another effort that started in the Reagan Administration has been the GOP campaign to destroy the unions -- one key tactic has been to ignore the law and stop prosecuting employers who break the law by hiring undocumented workers (eg, in construction).BTW about me and unions. Having been military and then a software engineer, I've never belonged to a union. For a long time I was antipathetic towards unions because of how they treated my father -- as a general contractor, he had to pay union dues in order to be able to work alongside union carpenters, but he could never draw any benefits because he was management. However, the more I've looked into it, the more I've come to realize the positive contributions that unions have made (as well as the downside0 and the negative consequences on the actual economy that have come from breaking the unions.