Given the fact that unemployment for veterans from 18-35 is greater than 9% and more will be trying to reenter the civilian work force, perhaps we have even more incentive to learn from the past:

By the war’s end, the U.S. government’s public debt exceeded 120 percent of GDP, almost twice today’s ratio. America worked off that debt not by tightening its belt but by liberating the economy’s potential. In 1945, there was no panel like President Obama’s Bowles-Simpson commission targeting the debt ratio a decade into the future and commending 10 years of budget cuts. Rather, the greater worry was that absent the stimulus of war and with 12 million newly jobless GIs returning home, the civilian economy would revert to depression. So America doubled down on its public investments with programs like the GI Bill and the Marshall Plan. For three decades, the economy grew faster than the debt, and the debt dwindled to less than 30 percent of GDP. Finance was well regulated so that there was no speculation in the public debt. The Department of the Treasury pegged the rate that the government would pay for its bonds at an affordable 2.5 percent. The Federal Reserve Board provided liquidity as necessary.
The 1 percent and the financial class caused the Great Recession. So why do we keep allowing them to shape policy?
Read it all: Austerity never works: Deficit hawks are amoral — and wrong
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