It's not a straw man, and your examples are no more apt than Rayiner's.
America's WWII mobilization is really nothing like the Green New Deal. The total cost of the U.S. war effort is estimated at around $300 B (adjusted for 2009 dollars) [1]. The lowest realistic estimates for the cost of an effective Green New Deal are around double that amount every year, and lasting for decades [2].
It's true that WWII cost far more relative to GDP (over a third, versus 2% for the New Green Deal estimate above), but expressing the cost relative to GDP is not very useful in this context; in 1945 the U.S. was poised to enter a period of ten percent annual GDP growth at a time that military spending was plunging. The situation now is completely opposite; the U.S. will possibly never sustain greater than 2% GDP growth, and the Green New Deal proposes to pull money out of that for decades to come.
The character of WWII spending was also completely different. That money was largely spent on things that were pretty much guaranteed to help the war effort; materiel, industrial infrastructure, and troops. There was little risk of misallocation.
In contrast, the Green New Deal is fraught with misallocation risk. In that way, I suppose that a comparison to modern military spending is actually quite appropriate.
America's WWII mobilization is really nothing like the Green New Deal. The total cost of the U.S. war effort is estimated at around $300 B (adjusted for 2009 dollars) [1]. The lowest realistic estimates for the cost of an effective Green New Deal are around double that amount every year, and lasting for decades [2].
It's true that WWII cost far more relative to GDP (over a third, versus 2% for the New Green Deal estimate above), but expressing the cost relative to GDP is not very useful in this context; in 1945 the U.S. was poised to enter a period of ten percent annual GDP growth at a time that military spending was plunging. The situation now is completely opposite; the U.S. will possibly never sustain greater than 2% GDP growth, and the Green New Deal proposes to pull money out of that for decades to come.
The character of WWII spending was also completely different. That money was largely spent on things that were pretty much guaranteed to help the war effort; materiel, industrial infrastructure, and troops. There was little risk of misallocation.
In contrast, the Green New Deal is fraught with misallocation risk. In that way, I suppose that a comparison to modern military spending is actually quite appropriate.
1 - https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-worl...
2 - https://newleftreview.org/issues/II112/articles/robert-polli...