Willem van de Velde the Younger, Dutch ships in a calm. Public domain.
The Marshall Plan sent American money and goods to Western Europe so those countries could rebuild and buy, and American taxpayers funded the customers.
A stretched household did not receive a Marshall Plan check, and it did pay taxes into a budget that included the program.
A farm or factory household could feel the plan as demand for grain, machinery, or cloth, if that was the work Europe was buying.
An exporter or a manufacturer with idle capacity gained orders financed by public funds, which is a market created by an appropriation.
The Economic Cooperation Act of 1948 set up the European Recovery Program that Secretary of State George Marshall had urged the year before.
The aid was grants and loans for food, fuel, and equipment, much of it bought in the United States.
The household case was that ruined customers do not buy, and that the taxes were paying for a trading world in which American payrolls had somewhere to sell.
Economic Cooperation Act of 1948