Wartime Economy Quotes

Money is always to be found when men are to be sent to the frontiers to be destroyed: when the object is to preserve them, it is no longer so

Now all of you profiteering "patriots" who have bawled yourself hoarse about "standing back of the President" get into line and support his recommendation for "additional taxes on war profits, incomes and luxuries.

Almost all war making states borrow extensively, raise taxes, and seize the means of combat - including men - from reluctant citizens.

From the spring of 1941, I controlled all prices in the United States. You could lower a price without my permission, but you couldn't raise a price without my permission or that of my staff.

World War II ended the Great Depression with one of the great public-private industrial collaborations in the history of man.

Americans will cheerfully forgo the luxury of new automobiles in order to assure adequate mechanized equipment for defense.

In time of this grave national danger, when all excess income should go to win the war, no American citizen ought to have a net income, after he has paid his taxes, of more than $25,000 a year.

Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes.

During the last war when there was a market for everything that could be produced, the production capacity of Canada and the United States, which were outside the battle area, increased one hundred percent.

The greatly increased consumption of alcoholic beverages is very largely a direct result of the increased purchasing power created by wartime expenditures.

At the beginning of World War II the U.S. had a mere 600 or so first-class fighting aircraft. We rapidly overcame this short supply by turning out more than 90,000 planes a year. The question at the start of World War II was: Do we have enough funds to produce the required implements of war? The answer was No, we did not have enough money, nor did we have enough gold; but we did have more than enough resources. It was the available resources that enabled the US to achieve the high production and efficiency required to win the war. Unfortunately this is only considered in times of war.

Between 1939 and 1945 you produced weapons and war equipment valued at thirteen billion dollars, 70 per cent of which you shipped to your allies. The same process is going on today in Canada's much larger and growing industry.

Every GOP administration since 1952 has let the Military-Industrial Complex loot the Treasury and plunge the nation into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency.

I was in charge of price controls in World War II and had a ceiling on overall prices. Everybody who was subject to general maximum price regulation wanted an exception and went to Congress to persuade a Congressman, or a group of people on the Hill, that I was being a menace to their industry.

What saved the economy, and the New Deal, was the enormous public works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs.

There were not many people who could say that their education had been paid for with cigarettes.

I do not believe it would have been possible to have continued [wartime taxes] for the purpose of carrying on the American war … The question there is whether, under all these circumstances, it was not better to conclude the peace at the present moment, before the impatience of the country on the subject had been manifested at public meetings, or by motions in Parliament.

World War II synchronizes things for a lot of people. There's a kind of wakeup call.