Before World War II, the role of government budgets and deficits had tended to increase during wartime and contract during the postwar years. As a result, it could be said that the greater share of national debt was a consequence of wartime deficit financing under demand-pull inflationary conditions. In the postwar years, the principal problem facing agricultural policy makers in the United States was the disposal of the surplus that highly productive agricultural sector made possible. The productivity has been growing at a much faster rate in agriculture than it has in the industrial sector of the U.S. economy. Since World War II there has been a considerable growth of the national debt in the United States, in contrast to the earlier postwar experiences, when the role of government and deficit financing contracted. Up until the early sixties, the U.S. national debt was still less than it had been at the end of World War II.