WW2 helped pull America out of the Great Depression by increasing labor needs exponentially, especially in manufacturing. When the war was over, the government didn’t want to erase all the jobs it had created, as well as wanting to keep the Soviet Union in check, so it permanized the military and created the military industrial complex. Continually pouring money into science research and military developments had many positive benefits such as a national highway system, the development of the transitor, and the creation of the mp3 audio format. However, this was also setting up America to fail. The Soviets weren’t able to keep competing with us and the Soviet Union ended up bankrupt and split up. However, once the Soviet Block was dissolved, we still continued to build-up our military. Was the fall of the Soviets not warning enough that something similar would soon happen to us? This great excess in spending, while resulting in many scientific innovations, also began to land our country in more and more debt. One has to wonder if our Congress would still be arguing ineffectively every few months about having to raise the debt ceiling if the military industrial complex was dissolved after the Soviet Union fell. Many would claim we needed our huge standing military in order to conduct the ‘War on Terror’ several years later, but if we hadn’t already been so prepared to go to war, would that have happened in the first place? It is widely accepted now that we rushed into wars in the middle east because of the emotional outrage over 9/11 and faulty information provided by the Bush administration, but if we instead had needed months and months to prepare for war, we may have been able to stop it and therefore save millions of lives that didn’t need to wasted.