The Marshall Plan...and its derived World Bank and International Monetary Fund helped to stem the advance of international soviet style communism in Western Europe.
The growth of the Defense industry directly following WWII and the desire to defend European Allies from an encroaching Imperial power led to the placement of missile systems in Europe and the subsumation of soveriegn defense industries. in the US's zeal to aid its allies Europe reduced defense spending to around 1% of GDP where as the US, eager to aid its allies, was at 3% and up.

This led to Europe not needing to spend money on defense from an obvioulsy expansive power. While taxes were still collected there was no large defense budget to eat it up. The continued taxation coupled with loans and grants led a glut of state held money wit nobudget to spend it on.
It is my belief that this led to the development of Social programs such as CAP and others giving birth to a more benevolent form of socialism than we saw in the old USSR.
Wihtout the US desire to defned its Allies, rebuild Europe, and obstruct our ideological enemy ( boy, i sound like Hitler there!) we unintentionally created a breeding grond for the spectre of socialism to rise again. And this socialism is spreading. Already the US and Canadian liberal-left parties look to Europe as models for governance and tax structure.

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Wihtout the US desire to defned its Allies, rebuild Europe, and obstruct our ideological enemy ( boy, i sound like Hitler there!) we unintentionally created a breeding grond for the spectre of socialism to rise again.

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It is my belief that this led to the development of Social programs such as CAP and others giving birth to a more benevolent form of socialism than we saw in the old USSR.

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I thought Otto von Bismarck was credited with creating the first social programs in the 1880's.

Of course there were socialist programmes well before the Cold War. Bismark was one, but there were also reasonable programmes in Scandinavia and in some of Latin America.

But I do think that the US tolerated social democratic programmes as part of its attempt to win and keep allies in its struggle with Communism. That struggle began in the 1920's or 30's at the latest, and the wiser capitalists supported the New Deal as a way to combat socialist tendencies in the US itself.

With the collapse of the USSR, there is now less reason to require "capitalism with a human face".
Thus, following the defeat of the USSR, we began to be told that we "cannot afford" those programmes, and there was substantial retrenchment.

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But I do think that the US tolerated social democratic programmes as part of its attempt to win and keep allies in its struggle with Communism. That struggle began in the 1920's or 30's at the latest, and the wiser capitalists supported the New Deal as a way to combat socialist tendencies in the US itself.

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And it is largely true that the USA drifted somewhat into socialism (as socialist as it's ever been) through the 1950s and 1960s, and to some extent even the 1970s and 1980s, in order to ensure that not too many people saw the attraction in Communism. We may recall that even in the inflationary 1970s, Social Security and Medicare were indexed to the inflation rate (never mind what this would cost the government), and Ronald Reagan, for all his rhetoric about downsizing government, never once dared touch the "third rail" of US politics, Social Security.