Mussolini spent like crazy.

 Mussolini spent like crazy. When he seized power in 1922, Italy’s national debt was 93 billion lire. By 1943, it was over 405 billion.

Anybody expecting Republicans to be spending like it was going out of style any time soon? Will they be listening to Robert Reich rather than Grover Norquist?

According to biographer Christopher Hibbert, Mussolini “instituted a programme of public works hitherto unrivalled in modern Europe. Bridges, canals and roads were built, hospitals and schools, railway stations and orphanages; swamps were drained and land reclaimed, forests were planted and universities were endowed.” A. James Gregor, the author of Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship, described fascist Italy’s spending on social welfare programs as comparing “favorably with the more advanced European nations and in some respect was more progressive.” When New York city politician Grover Aloysius Whalen asked Mussolini about the meaning behind Italian fascism in 1939, the reply was: “It is like your New Deal!”

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/27/the-political-economy-of-fascism/

Mussolini pointed to the co-ops as examples of his corporatist ideals. Kasmir explains this anomaly in terms of how they “embodied worker participation, nonconflictual relations between labor and management, and the withering away of class identifications.”