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How the United States became the most prosperous society in the world has always been such a hotspot issue. Certain long-standin

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问题     How the United States became the most prosperous society in the world has always been such a hotspot issue. Certain long-standing cliches surround the story of America’s "economic takeoff" in the two decades before 1960. One centers on the role of World War II and the federal government’s massive spending to win.【F1】The fact that GDP almost doubled in those same years, with unemployment shrinking to little more than 1 percent, has led many historians and economists to conclude that the two phenomena must be connected.
    However, World War II did not end the Great Depression; in crucial respects, it may have prolonged it. Even its amazing rise in industrial production—26 percent in just five years—was only half of what the 1920s had achieved without the same massive government spending.【F2】Rather, what the war-production effort did do was to restore American industrial production to something approaching normal levels and to fuel an economic recovery afterwards.
    Even the amazing numbers usually given to illustrate the "wartime boom" are softer than they appear at first glance. For example, a drastic drop in unemployment isn’t difficult to engineer when almost 12 million of the eligible workforce get conscripted into the armed forces. Real non-government GNP growth, which was moving ahead in 1940, actually slowed down in 1942 and then slowed still further in 1943.
    In fact, far from having a multiplier effect, spending on the war may have interrupted an e-conomic recovery already under way.【F3】In 1940-41, just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and when government spending was still at relatively low levels, GNP jumped from $90.5 billion in 1939 to $124.5 billion. Then, with mobilization, private consumption and investment headed south while government deficit spending headed sharply north, rising from $6 billion in 1940 to $89 billion in 1944.
    And while millions of Americans found work in wartime factories and shipyards and farm and non-farm incomes steadily rose(for industrial workers, by an average of 70 percent), it was impossible for them to buy new durable goods, from cars to refrigerators, and they found many basic consumer goods, such as coffee, meat, sugar, gasoline, shoes, and newsprint, strictly rationed.【F4】In addition, nearly everyone was paying out a growing sum of their income in federal taxes to pay for the war—a tax on incomes as low as $ 645 a year(less than $ 7,740 in today’s dollars).
    Yet despite the wartime restrictions, Americans still ate better, consumed more meat, bought more shoes and clothing, and used more energy than they had before the war.【F5】And even though the United States wound up producing the most munitions(军需品)of any country in World War II, it was also the least mobilized of all the major combatants. At no time did more than 40 percent of its economy switch over to war material production. That allowed 60 percent of American women to stay home and men such as Milton Reynolds to make sales calls at department stores as if nothing were happening, and dream of better days.
    All the evidence suggests, then, that the war didn’t create a strong U. S. economy. It was the strong economy that made mobilization for war possible without impoverishing the country(which is what happened to Great Britain and the Soviet Union). What World War II actually did was sacrifice real present growth in order to defeat the Axis. Yet it also set the table so that "as the war ended," writes economist Robert Higgs, "real prosperity returned almost overnight. " It was the crucial period of 1945 to 1947 that really marked the start of economic takeoff.
【F3】
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答案在珍珠港还未遭到轰炸、政府的财政支出处于相对较低的水平的1940年到1941年间，国民生产总值从1939年的905亿美元增长到1245亿美元。
解析 翻译本句需要了解介词短语before the bombing of Pearl Harbor和时间状语从句whengovernment spending was…在句中的作用，它们具体说明了1940年到1941年的具体情况。因此翻译时可以将两个状语成分前置，将之转译为1940年到1941年的定语，更加突出地强调该阶段的特殊性。
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