Thread: "...in bed"

haha ^^ NeAvO really gets around... in bed

What can I say, I'm a good friend...in bed

we could go on like this all day... in bed

Lol

Burns perhaps we should stop talking about me...in bed.

i like games... in bed.

This thread is rather funny in bed.

Tonight, I'm going to get in bed.

(THAT ACTUALLY MAKES SENSE&#33


...in bed.

Why haven't I joined this thread and all you nutcases... in bed?

because you're crazy... in bed

<-- What&#39;s this smiley doing in bed?

For the United States, World War II and the Great Depression constituted the most important economic event of the twentieth century. The war&#39;s effects were varied and far-reaching. The war decisively ended the depression itself. The federal government emerged from the war as a potent economic actor, able to regulate economic activity and to partially control the economy through spending and consumption. American industry was revitalized by the war, and many sectors were by 1945 either sharply oriented to defense production (for example, aerospace and electronics) or completely dependent on it (atomic energy). The organized labor movement, strengthened by the war beyond even its depression-era height, became a major counterbalance to both the government and private industry. The war&#39;s rapid scientific and technological changes continued and intensified trends begun during the Great Depression and created a permanent expectation of continued innovation on the part of many scientists, engineers, government officials and citizens. Similarly, the substantial increases in personal income and frequently, if not always, in quality of life during the war led many Americans to foresee permanent improvements to their material circumstances, even as others feared a postwar return of the depression. Finally, the war&#39;s global scale severely damaged every major economy in the world except for the United States, which thus enjoyed unprecedented economic and political power after 1945.
The global conflict which was labeled World War II emerged from the Great Depression, an upheaval which destabilized governments, economies, and entire nations around the world. In Germany, for instance, the rise of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party occurred at least partly because Hitler claimed to be able to transform a weakened Germany into a self-sufficient military and economic power which could control its own destiny in European and world affairs, even as liberal powers like the United States and Great Britain were buffeted by the depression.
In the United States, President Franklin Roosevelt promised, less dramatically, to enact a "New Deal" which would essentially reconstruct American capitalism and governance on a new basis. As it waxed and waned between 1933 and 1940, Roosevelt&#39;s New Deal mitigated some effects of the Great Depression, but did not end the economic crisis. In 1939, when World War II erupted in Europe with Germany&#39;s invasion of Poland, numerous economic indicators suggested that the United States was still deeply mired in the depression. For instance, after 1929 the American gross domestic product declined for four straight years, then slowly and haltingly climbed back to its 1929 level, which was finally exceeded again in 1936. (Watkins, 2002; Johnston and Williamson, 2004)
Unemployment was another measure of the depression&#39;s impact. Between 1929 and 1939, the American unemployment rate averaged 13.3 percent (calculated from "Corrected BLS" figures in Darby, 1976, 8). In the summer of 1940, about 5.3 million Americans were still unemployed — far fewer than the 11.5 million who had been unemployed in 1932 (about thirty percent of the American workforce) but still a significant pool of unused labor and, often, suffering citizens. (Darby, 1976, 7. For somewhat different figures, see Table 3 below.)
In spite of these dismal statistics, the United States was, in other ways, reasonably well prepared for war. The wide array of New Deal programs and agencies which existed in 1939 meant that the federal government was markedly larger and more actively engaged in social and economic activities than it had been in 1929. Moreover, the New Deal had accustomed Americans to a national government which played a prominent role in national affairs and which, at least under Roosevelt&#39;s leadership, often chose to lead, not follow, private enterprise and to use new capacities to plan and administer large-scale endeavors.
Preparedness and Conversion
As war spread throughout Europe and Asia between 1939 and 1941, nowhere was the federal government&#39;s leadership more important than in the realm of "preparedness" — the national project to ready for war by enlarging the military, strengthening certain allies such as Great Britain, and above all converting America&#39;s industrial base to produce armaments and other war materiel rather than civilian goods. "Conversion" was the key issue in American economic life in 1940-1942. In many industries, company executives resisted converting to military production because they did not want to lose consumer market share to competitors who did not convert. Conversion thus became a goal pursued by public officials and labor leaders. In 1940, Walter Reuther, a high-ranking officer in the United Auto Workers labor union, provided impetus for conversion by advocating that the major automakers convert to aircraft production. Though initially rejected by car-company executives and many federal officials, the Reuther Plan effectively called the public&#39;s attention to America&#39;s lagging preparedness for war. Still, the auto companies only fully converted to war production in 1942 and only began substantially contributing to aircraft production in 1943.
Even for contemporary observers, not all industries seemed to be lagging as badly as autos, though. Merchant shipbuilding mobilized early and effectively. The industry was overseen by the U.S. Maritime Commission (USMC), a New Deal agency established in 1936 to revive the moribund shipbuilding industry, which had been in a depression since 1921, and to ensure that American shipyards would be capable of meeting wartime demands. With the USMC supporting and funding the establishment and expansion of shipyards around the country, including especially the Gulf and Pacific coasts, merchant shipbuilding took off. The entire industry had produced only 71 ships between 1930 and 1936, but from 1938 to 1940, commission-sponsored shipyards turned out 106 ships, and then almost that many in 1941 alone (Fischer, 41). The industry&#39;s position in the vanguard of American preparedness grew from its strategic import — ever more ships were needed to transport American goods to Great Britain and France, among other American allies — and from the Maritime Commission&#39;s ability to administer the industry through means as varied as construction contracts, shipyard inspectors, and raw goading of contractors by commission officials.
Many of the ships built in Maritime Commission shipyards carried American goods to the European allies as part of the "Lend-Lease" program, which was instituted in 1941 and provided another early indication that the United States could and would shoulder a heavy economic burden. By all accounts, Lend-Lease was crucial to enabling Great Britain and the Soviet Union to fight the Axis, not least before the United States formally entered the war in December 1941. (Though scholars are still assessing the impact of Lend-Lease on these two major allies, it is likely that both countries could have continued to wage war against Germany without American aid, which seems to have served largely to augment the British and Soviet armed forces and to have shortened the time necessary to retake the military offensive against Germany.) Between 1941 and 1945, the U.S. exported about &#036;32.5 billion worth of goods through Lend-Lease, of which &#036;13.8 billion went to Great Britain and &#036;9.5 billion went to the Soviet Union (Milward, 71). The war dictated that aircraft, ships (and ship-repair services), military vehicles, and munitions would always rank among the quantitatively most important Lend-Lease goods, but food was also a major export to Britain (Milward, 72).
Pearl Harbor was an enormous spur to conversion. The formal declarations of war by the United States on Japan and Germany made plain, once and for all, that the American economy would now need to be transformed into what President Roosevelt had called "the Arsenal of Democracy" a full year before, in December 1940. From the perspective of federal officials in Washington, the first step toward wartime mobilization was the establishment of an effective administrative bureaucracy.
From the beginning of preparedness in 1939 through the peak of war production in 1944, American leaders recognized that the stakes were too high to permit the war economy to grow in an unfettered, laissez-faire manner. American manufacturers, for instance, could not be trusted to stop producing consumer goods and to start producing materiel for the war effort. To organize the growing economy and to ensure that it produced the goods needed for war, the federal government spawned an array of mobilization agencies which not only often purchased goods (or arranged their purchase by the Army and Navy), but which in practice closely directed those goods&#39; manufacture and heavily influenced the operation of private companies and whole industries.
Though both the New Deal and mobilization for World War I served as models, the World War II mobilization bureaucracy assumed its own distinctive shape as the war economy expanded. Most importantly, American mobilization was markedly less centralized than mobilization in other belligerent nations. The war economies of Britain and Germany, for instance, were overseen by war councils which comprised military and civilian officials. In the United States, the Army and Navy were not incorporated into the civilian administrative apparatus, nor was a supreme body created to subsume military and civilian organizations and to direct the vast war economy.
Instead, the military services enjoyed almost-unchecked control over their enormous appetites for equipment and personnel. With respect to the economy, the services were largely able to curtail production destined for civilians (e.g., automobiles or many non-essential foods) and even for war-related but non-military purposes (e.g., textiles and clothing). In parallel to but never commensurate with the Army and Navy, a succession of top-level civilian mobilization agencies sought to influence Army and Navy procurement of manufactured goods like tanks, planes, and ships, raw materials like steel and aluminum, and even personnel. One way of gauging the scale of the increase in federal spending and the concomitant increase in military spending is through comparison with GDP, which itself rose sharply during the war. Table 1 shows the dramatic increases in GDP, federal spending, and military spending.
Table 1: Federal Spending and Military Spending during World War II
(dollar values in billions of constant 1940 dollars)
Nominal GDP Federal Spending Defense Spending
Year total &#036; % increase total &#036; % increase % of GDP total &#036; % increase % of GDP % of federal spending
1940 101.4 9.47 9.34% 1.66 1.64% 17.53%
1941 120.67 19.00% 13.00 37.28% 10.77% 6.13 269.28% 5.08% 47.15%
1942 139.06 15.24% 30.18 132.15% 21.70% 22.05 259.71% 15.86% 73.06%
1943 136.44 -1.88% 63.57 110.64% 46.59% 43.98 99.46% 32.23% 69.18%
1944 174.84 28.14% 72.62 14.24% 41.54% 62.95 43.13% 36.00% 86.68%
1945 173.52 -0.75% 72.11 -0.70% 41.56% 64.53 2.51% 37.19% 89.49%
Sources: 1940 GDP figure from "Nominal GDP: Louis Johnston and Samuel H. Williamson, "The Annual Real and Nominal GDP for the United States, 1789 — Present," Economic History Services, March 2004, available at http://www.eh.net/hmit/gdp/ (accessed 27 July 2005). 1941-1945 GDP figures calculated using Bureau of Labor Statistics, "CPI Inflation Calculator," available at http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl. Federal and defense spending figures from Government Printing Office, "Budget of the United States Government: Historical Tables Fiscal Year 2005," Table 6.1—Composition of Outlays: 1940—2009 and Table 3.1—Outlays by Superfunction and Function: 1940—2009.
To oversee this growth, President Roosevelt created a number of preparedness agencies beginning in 1939, including the Office for Emergency Management and its key sub-organization, the National Defense Advisory Commission; the Office of Production Management; and the Supply Priorities Allocation Board. None of these organizations was particularly successful at generating or controlling mobilization because all included two competing parties. On one hand, private-sector executives and managers had joined the federal mobilization bureaucracy but continued to emphasize corporate priorities such as profits and positioning in the marketplace. On the other hand, reform-minded civil servants, who were often holdovers from the New Deal, emphasized the state&#39;s prerogatives with respect to mobilization and war making. As a result of this basic division in the mobilization bureaucracy, "the military largely remained free of mobilization agency control" (Koistinen, 502).
In January 1942, as part of another effort to mesh civilian and military needs, President Roosevelt established a new mobilization agency, the War Production Board, and placed it under the direction of Donald Nelson, a former Sears Roebuck executive. Nelson understood immediately that the staggeringly complex problem of administering the war economy could be reduced to one key issue: balancing the needs of civilians — especially the workers whose efforts sustained the economy — against the needs of the military — especially those of servicemen and women but also their military and civilian leaders.
Though neither Nelson nor other high-ranking civilians ever fully resolved this issue, Nelson did realize several key economic goals. First, in late 1942, Nelson successfully resolved the so-called "feasibility dispute," a conflict between civilian administrators and their military counterparts over the extent to which the American economy should be devoted to military needs during 1943 (and, by implication, in subsequent war years). Arguing that "all-out" production for war would harm America&#39;s long-term ability to continue to produce for war after 1943, Nelson convinced the military to scale back its Olympian demands. He thereby also established a precedent for planning war production so as to meet most military and some civilian needs. Second (and partially as a result of the feasibility dispute), the WPB in late 1942 created the "Controlled Materials Plan," which effectively allocated steel, aluminum, and copper to industrial users. The CMP obtained throughout the war, and helped curtail conflict among the military services and between them and civilian agencies over the growing but still scarce supplies of those three key metals.
By late 1942 it was clear that Nelson and the WPB were unable to fully control the growing war economy and especially to wrangle with the Army and Navy over the necessity of continued civilian production. Accordingly, in May 1943 President Roosevelt created the Office of War Mobilization and in July put James Byrne — a trusted advisor, a former U.S. Supreme Court justice, and the so-called "assistant president" — in charge. Though the WPB was not abolished, the OWM soon became the dominant mobilization body in Washington. Unlike Nelson, Byrnes was able to establish an accommodation with the military services over war production by "acting as an arbiter among contending forces in the WPB, settling disputes between the board and the armed services, and dealing with the multiple problems" of the War Manpower Commission, the agency charged with controlling civilian labor markets and with assuring a continuous supply of draftees to the military (Koistinen, 510).
Beneath the highest-level agencies like the WPB and the OWM, a vast array of other federal organizations administered everything from labor (the War Manpower Commission) to merchant shipbuilding (the Maritime Commission) and from prices (the Office of Price Administration) to food (the War Food Administration). Given the scale and scope of these agencies&#39; efforts, they did sometimes fail, and especially so when they carried with them the baggage of the New Deal. By the midpoint of America&#39;s involvement in the war, for example, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, and the Rural Electrification Administration — all prominent New Deal organizations which tried and failed to find a purpose in the mobilization bureaucracy — had been actually or virtually abolished.
However, these agencies were often quite successful in achieving their respective, narrower aims. The Department of the Treasury, for instance, was remarkably successful at generating money to pay for the war, including the first general income tax in American history and the famous "war bonds" sold to the public. Beginning in 1940, the government extended the income tax to virtually all Americans and began collecting the tax via the now-familiar method of continuous withholdings from paychecks (rather than lump-sum payments after the fact). The number of Americans required to pay federal taxes rose from 4 million in 1939 to 43 million in 1945. With such a large pool of taxpayers, the American government took in &#036;45 billion in 1945, an enormous increase over the &#036;8.7 billion collected in 1941 but still far short of the &#036;83 billion spent on the war in 1945. Over that same period, federal tax revenue grew from about 8 percent of GDP to more than 20 percent. Americans who earned as little as &#036;500 per year paid income tax at a 23 percent rate, while those who earned more than &#036;1 million per year paid a 94 percent rate. The average income tax rate peaked in 1944 at 20.9 percent ("Fact Sheet: Taxes").
All told, taxes provided about &#036;136.8 billion of the war&#39;s total cost of &#036;304 billion (Kennedy, 625). To cover the other &#036;167.2 billion, the Treasury Department also expanded its bond program, creating the famous "war bonds" hawked by celebrities and purchased in vast numbers and enormous values by Americans. The first war bond was purchased by President Roosevelt on May 1, 1941 ("Introduction to Savings Bonds"). Though the bonds returned only 2.9 percent annual interest after a 10-year maturity, they nonetheless served as a valuable source of revenue for the federal government and an extremely important investment for many Americans. Bonds served as a way for citizens to make an economic contribution to the war effort, but because interest on them accumulated slower than consumer prices rose, they could not completely preserve income which could not be readily spent during the war. By the time war-bond sales ended in 1946, 85 million Americans had purchased more than &#036;185 billion worth of the securities, often through automatic deductions from their paychecks ("Brief History of World War Two Advertising Campaigns: War Loans and Bonds"). Commercial institutions like banks also bought billions of dollars of bonds and other treasury paper, holding more than &#036;24 billion at the war&#39;s end (Kennedy, 626).
Fiscal and financial matters were also addressed by other federal agencies. For instance, the Office of Price Administration used its "General Maximum Price Regulation" (also known as "General Max") to attempt to curtail inflation by maintaining prices at their March 1942 levels. In July, the National War Labor Board (NWLB; a successor to a New Deal-era body) limited wartime wage increases to about 15 percent, the factor by which the cost of living rose from January 1941 to May 1942. Neither "General Max" nor the wage-increase limit was entirely successful, though federal efforts did curtail inflation. Between April 1942 and June 1946, the period of the most stringent federal controls on inflation, the annual rate of inflation was just 3.5 percent; the annual rate had been 10.3 percent in the six months before April 1942 and it soared to 28.0 percent in the six months after June 1946 (Rockoff, "Price and Wage Controls in Four Wartime Periods," 382).With wages rising about 65 percent over the course of the war, this limited success in cutting the rate of inflation meant that many American civilians enjoyed a stable or even improving quality of life during the war (Kennedy, 641). Improvement in the standard of living was not ubiquitous, however. In some regions, such as rural areas in the Deep South, living standards stagnated or even declined, and according to some economists, the national living standard barely stayed level or even declined (Higgs, 1992).
Labor unions and their members benefited especially. The NWLB&#39;s "maintenance-of-membership" rule allowed unions to count all new employees as union members and to draw union dues from those new employees&#39; paychecks, so long as the unions themselves had already been recognized by the employer. Given that most new employment occurred in unionized workplaces, including plants funded by the federal government through defense spending, "the maintenance-of-membership ruling was a fabulous boon for organized labor," for it required employers to accept unions and allowed unions to grow dramatically: organized labor expanded from 10.5 million members in 1941 to 14.75 million in 1945 (Blum, 140). By 1945, approximately 35.5 percent of the non-agricultural workforce was unionized, a record high. Despite the almost-continual crises of the civilian war agencies, the American economy expanded at an unprecedented (and unduplicated) rate between 1941 and 1945. The gross national product of the U.S., as measured in constant dollars, grew from &#036;88.6 billion in 1939 — while the country was still suffering from the depression — to &#036;135 billion in 1944. War-related production skyrocketed from just two percent of GNP to 40 percent in 1943 in bed.

ROFL

Originally Posted by really

ROFL [/b]

You&#39;re disqualified&#33; - you didn&#39;t say &#39;in bed&#39; at the end... uh... in bed.

Originally Posted by Burns

You&#39;re disqualified&#33; - you didn&#39;t say &#39;in bed&#39; at the end... uh... in bed.
[/b]

Burns I didn&#39;t know we all have to follow your rules...in bed

Originally Posted by NeAvO

Burns I didn&#39;t know we all have to follow your rules...in bed [/b]

LOL

Yep, what I say, goes... in bed

<1> 23/9/06 – Headteacher’s Secret in bed

I was standing outside my school in the car park, and there were several people around me, talking about things to each other in bed. One of them, a really small annoying kid who is at my school IRL, came up to me and called me a name or something in bed. He laughed a bit, and I laughed with him in bed. He then told me to go into the school for something; I can’t remember what it was in bed.

I headed for the main entrance, which was about 50 metres away in bed. As soon as I got there, I continued up the corridor to the left until I found Mark, one of my classmates in bed. We both made daft funny mooing noises at each other in bed…

We were standing next to what is really the janitor’s office IRL, but there was a sign on it that said “Headteacher’s Room” in bed. Mark told me to have a look inside, so I quietly opened the door, and what I saw was hilarious in bed: The walls were pink, the carpet was pink, and there was the headteacher in a double pink floral patterened bed wearing a pink floral showercap in bed&#33; He told us to get out, because he looked kind of embarrassed in bed.

My math teacher, Mrs. Bowman, is loud as hell in bed.

Ive got cold feet....In Bed&#33;

Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit in bed.

I&#39;ve had lots of fun today...in bed

Originally Posted by NeAvO

I&#39;ve had lots of fun today...in bed
[/b]

Really? What have you been up to in bed?

He&#39;s been celebrating his birthday today... in bed

Do you both really want to know what I&#39;ve been up to...in bed?

Originally Posted by NeAvO

Do you both really want to know what I&#39;ve been up to...in bed?
[/b]

Sure, tell me in bed.