Lusitan,
I can see no "spoils" from WWII.
There were plenty of economic post-war spoils, in *some* sense. Yes, they were obviously paid for with a lot of blood and a lot of sacrifices -- so in some sense were "earned" -- but the fact that the U.S. was the only major industrialized nation left standing that wasn't devastated by war is THE major reason, IMO, why there was an unsustainable period -- dare I say "bubble" -- in the post-war economy for a good 25-30 years. The rest of the world needed the U.S. to rebuild it which created an unrivaled prosperity for U.S. businesses and the domestic economy.
IMO it's no accident that unions peaked then -- U.S. business was so strong that it could give the unions better and better deals and still be very profitable. When the pie was growing rapidly, companies could share the pie much more generously. At least until Europe was rebuilt and Japan emerged by about 1970, give or take. At that point U.S. businesses faced new cost pressures they hadn't seen since the war ended.
Yet for decades we pretended not to notice this inconvenient reality, pretending the deal that middle class workers were getting was sustainable, that business could still provide job security, pensions and wages that beat inflation. We pretended Social Security would remain strong. We did these things by borrowing prosperity from the future -- in the form of personal, corporate and governmental borrowing. For a while you can build that house of cards and it will seem sturdy -- but when the house of cards gets bigger, it becomes more unstable and more fragile, requiring ever more borrowing to maintain until it hits the breaking point and nothing can hold it up.
I have no evidence, but I suspect our *real* standard of living -- inflation-adjusted and without including borrowed prosperity -- has mostly been falling for at least 20 years and maybe longer. Only with the addition of debt to "preserve" the standard of living for current generations (and screwing future generations) have we been able to maintain the illusion of increased prosperity through more and more stuff. We'll be better off long-term without all that stuff, but we've taken so much from the future that I don't know that future generations could maintain the same standard of living or have the same retirement expectations even without all the "stuff."
I think the house of cards is reaching a breaking point. It's time to let parts of it fall over, deal with the pain and build a more sustainable economy for future generations; we've taken so much of their future wealth already that I hope we can find a way to allow them to prosper at least somewhat, too. And heck, maybe they'll even find a way to retire despite all the headwinds their ancestors foisted on them.