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Bring Back the WPA?
Channeling Paul Krugman, Matt Yglesias wonders why we don't fight unemployment by essentially bringing back the WPA:
Instead of saying to people whose UI benefits are about to expire “just kidding, here’s an extension” we could say “you’ll keep getting checks but you need to show up at
such-and-such a place and pick up trash in parks.” This would be somewhat more expensive than a UI extension — you’d need to pay for garbage bags and supervisors — but it would have less of a disemployment effect than UI extensions and we’d also get cleaner parks in the bargain. It’s a little bit perverse to be paying people to do nothing when there’s work that could use doing.
I think this is more difficult than it sounds. Matt admits later that public sector unions would — with good reason — oppose the idea of bringing in unemployed workers to do their jobs, but the problems go way beyond that. The WPA didn't just send people to parks to pick up trash. It was a huge bureacracy. It was a program set up to last for years. After all, there was a Depression on.
But that's not what we have today. Nobody thinks the current recession will last for five years, and by the time a government bureacracy was up and running to provide jobs it probably wouldn't be needed anymore. Like it or not, hiring people takes longer than it used to, building roads and post offices requires years of design and preparation, and there just isn't that much easy makework available. It's a different era.
I might be missing something obvious here, but unemployment insurance can be extended instantly (barring Republican game playing, of course) and the money gets out to workers and then into the economy almost instantly too. Conversely, creating useful jobs of some kind would take, I imagine, an absolute minimum of six months, and probably more like a year or more. By then they wouldn't be needed.
It really does seem more efficient to write checks to the private sector, as well as to state and local governments, and let them hire people. The federal government is good at writing checks! But, at least in the 21st century, not so good at creating nationwide jobs programs, I suspect.
Trails
Just have them refurbish the national parks, they're in need of a tune up.
WPA No, Education Yes
Many of the unemployed aren't going back to work any time soon; a significant proportion of those over 45 will never work again, even though they want to. Many of the jobs that have been eliminated will never return.
Most of these workers are in need of retraining, but sadly, many (perhaps most) states don't allow full time students to receive unemployment compensation. As well as extended benefits, the unemployed desperately need educational benefits.
What the unemployed don't need is another WPA or CCC. Being unemployed is humiliating enough for most people; asking someone who is 20 or 30 years into their career to pick up trash for a living is just too much.
Retraining in what, exactly?
> Most of these workers are in need of retraining,
Retraining in what, exactly? Please don't say "high tech" or "computer systems", since those jobs are being sent to India faster than you can say 'quarterly earnings'. Medical paraprofessional? Perhaps; the demand is there, but just as with housebuilding we cannot have an entire economy built on cleaning one another's bedpans.
Cranky
Few pols/econs seem to
Few pols/econs seem to understand this.
We're all going to become healthcare workers.
This is as stupid as 10 years ago when we were all going to work in entertainment (probably making videogames), or when we were all going to have service jobs (welcome to Walmart).
Three good reasons why not
1. Letting wild areas be wild might not be such a bad idea; who needs more guardrails?
2. That wouldn't exactly have much of a "multiplier", now would it? Compare it to, for instance, research that helps create companies.
3. Many or most of the jobs would go to foreign citizens who are here illegally, with the blessing of the Democrats who join with the GOP stab American workers in the back every chance they get.
Speaking of which, why not simply ramp up imm. enforcement?
Maybe Kevin Drum can answer this: wouldn't ramping up imm. enforcement reduce unemployment in the U.S.? And, wouldn't that be a net financial benefit considering that any reduced spending due to fewer illegal aliens would be met with more Americans spending money they earned working rather than obtaining unemployment? Wouldn't that be the best option for the U.S.? Or, is what's best for the Democratic Party more important to Drum than what's best for the U.S.?
See also this from over seven months ago (they never replied):
http://24ahead.com/dear-center-american-progress-do-you-support-getting-...
Um, twaddle
on all counts. Aren't you missing a Rush Limbaugh broadcast or something? Go do that.
Wrong, this downturn is different.
High unemployment will likely last for years. Unemployment benefits are great for short-term joblessness, but if a person is out of the work force for several years, it is very difficult to get back in. It creates a "culture of joblessness" and a longterm drag on the economy.
And how different would a modern WPA be than the "workfare" programs across the country? I also don't buy the argument that it would take years to implement.
In addition, you don't necessarily have to make such a program a directly run govt program. You could outsource job creation to the private sector. Subsize employment in certain sectors by paying their payroll taxes, for instance.
An Organic Chicken in Every Pot, and a Hybrid in Every Garage
"Nobody thinks the current recession will last for five years"
Just what people thought at the beginning of the Great Despression (IIRC the stock market was within 30% of its previous peak by summer 1930), and at the beginning of Japan's lost decade(s).
Prosperity is just around the corner, Mr. Hoover?
Some news from 1930: "Companies reporting decent earnings: United Light & Power, Federal Water Service, Loews."
More WSJ from the Great Depression at:
http://newsfrom1930.blogspot.com/
Not only that, but...
...this is not a recession. Aside from the fictional growth of the huge fanance/housing/fraud bubble and war spending, this "recession" has been going on since 1999. That came on the end of a quarter of century of contraction in real economic activity in exchange for a growth in the "service economy" (service of the lower and middle classes to the rich). This is a depression, and it has already lasted more than five years. Many people assume that it will end soon, but nobody can describe the mechanism that will restore our economy to any semblance of its late 20th century health, and insincere economic optimism has always been a lucrative business.
Start with not laying off workers
Here in CA, we're shutting down state parks, with actual folks doing jobs there.
No WPA required, just stop the pink-slips.
San Francisco had layoffs of Recreation Center staffs
San Francisco schools are laying off administrative assistants, playground monitors.
Surely it's better to keep those jobs, than to create a new WPA to re-hire those layed off workers?
Good point. A modern WPA
Good point. A modern WPA could take the form of supporting local govt employment. The stimulus bill did just that, to a certain degree, and probably was the most effective measure in that legislation.
The conservatives would hate it, but who gives a rat's ass about them.
I hate to say it, but Paul
I hate to say it, but Paul Krugman a few months ago was saying that any stimulus is good stimulus and all us libtards were following him. And now Paul Krugman and us are all upset that we're not getting any big infrastructure or any cool new big projects.
Well, that's what happens when you say any stimulus is good stimulus.
What did we get?
Lots of potholes, filled up this year, empty next year.
Increased temporary gov't paper pusher jobs, adding little value to the world now, and less when they are curtailed.
Saved the jobs of many teachers -- which IS a good thing.
Neither Obama or Krugman gave us any goals, or any metrics, or any vision on how to tell a good stimulus job from a bad one. I think Krugman failed microeconomics & HR today: (on the folly of rewarding a while hoping for b), and I think Obama failed to be a leader.
As an example of opportunity missed, at the same time the "virginia graeme baker pool and spa safety act" was coming into effect which closed down temporarily or permanently public pools, apartment pools, many many pools until they could be retrofit to have drains safe for kids. I watched several pools have to be completely rebuilt, and I read of many civic pools shutting down. This would have been a perfect and wonderful use of stimulus dollars.
I love Paul Krugman, but I disagree with him that all stimulus was the same and there was no way to measure or prioritize stimulus jobs.
I think you mischaracterize
I think you mischaracterize Krugman's stance. He worried that too small a stimulus, like the one we got, could discredit the very idea of a stimulus. That unfortunately is probably coming true.
Having said that, the U.S. economy is certainly better off now that it would have been with no stimulus at all.
The goal of a stimulus is to prop up demand. Having worthwhile projects that enhance future productivity is also good, but is secondary. Speed of implementation is the first objective.
I don't believe I
I don't believe I mischaracterize it at all.
He specifically spoke of jobs to dig holes and fill them up as being good stimulus.
And that's what we got.
I think that even then, Krugman and Obama could have suggested goals and metrics for what a good job is and how job programs should have been prioritized.
We got no infrastructure because there was no demand from Krugman or the others for infrastructure. Because that was hard and digging holes and filling them up was easier and was just as good a stimulus.
"The goal of a stimulus is to prop up demand. Having worthwhile projects that enhance future productivity is also good, but is secondary. Speed of implementation is the first objective."
And you're agreeing with Krugman then, and so you should be happy some of the potholes are filled and some others need refilling and we have lots of temporary gov't jobs and nothing really else to show for it.
Fine, you don't support the
Fine, you don't support the central idea of Keynsian stimulus, despite the evidence to support it. I also think you are wrong in saying there was no infrastructure in the stimulus. Not enough, I agree, but none? I see the signs on the highway.
And what we got to show for it was some GDP growth last quarter when we could have easily fallen into another depression instead. Sorry if that doesn't seem worth it to you.
Uh, I didn't say ANY of
Uh, I didn't say ANY of that, but I can you how frustrated you feel.
I think you and Paul fell into the fallacy of the excluded middle. The alternatives of a long drawn out process to get the bestest stimulus was not only to just shovel money as fast as possible to pay people to dig holes and then fill them out.
Right now, PK wants another stimulus, so it's clear that one alternative would have been a stimulus in phases, the get people back immediately phase concurrent with plan for starting infrastructure in 4-6 month phase, followed by some of the bigger infrastructure projects to come on line in the 9-24 month period.
Yes, theoretically, if all you can do is dig those holes and fill them out, then yes, that's a fine stimulus.
But in reality, we had lots of bridges to build or rebuild, lots of light rail that could have been extended, lots of airports and ports that could use new facilities, and even streets that could be widened.
So yours and Paul's insistence then that any stimulus was good stimulus was bound to run into political problems and into what Paul and Yglesias and Atrios and others complain of now, which is, "we paid $787B and all we got were these lousy T-Shirts?"
Um, and you're of course wrong to think I am the only one complaining of no infrastructure in the stimulus, that's been PK's and Atrios' and others complaints the past few weeks, starting about a month or two ago with revelations that Summers hates infrastructure.
"We got no infrastructure"
"We got no infrastructure" -- sorry if I misunderstood that. But I do agree that there should have a lot more in the stimulus.
The problem was that the economy was falling off a cliff in a way that none of us has ever seen. We had to spend money right away, But now that disaster has been averted, people are disappointed that it wasn't perfect.
The projects you mention are all worthwhile, and I believe some of them are included in the stimulus program. Not enough, I agree. But the bill was wasn't big enough in the first place and was a compromise with a GOP that wouldn't even vote for it.
It pays not to advertise.
In Georgia they made a decision NOT to advertise the Stimulus Projects. No signs will go up. 'It costs too much' is the reason.
Also this is a red state and it would look bad if we were receiving funds from a Democratic Washington.
L-Shaped Recession
According to Krugman, Stiglitz, and many others, unemployment is likely to remain very high for many years to come, and that's assuming that it's possible for growth to continue at 3-3.5 percent. I don't understand how one can make the claim that our unemployment problem will be over next year, which is essentially what is claimed here. There's no evidence on which to base that claim.
many predict the dreaded L recession.
As several commenters have already said. And I have to agree the anon above, the debate quickly degenerated into the shovel ready stuff, with concern about the long term value of the projects funded. And we are facing serious future challenges, one of the biggest is energy. And here we had a golden opportunity to spend a gazillion bucks that we probably won't have again. And heck with all the concern about the deficits discretionary funds will be hard to come by in the future. So we let a bunch of shovel ready nonsense dictate that our one chance to build needed infrastructure was wasted.
I had two ARRA projects messing up my commute these past few months. One was a needed improvement, the other repaved a road that had only been built nine months earlier! So in a couple of years when we will desperately need to cut our oil consumption, because we can't afford to pay for it, we will have done almost nothing, and be too broke to boot to do anything about it.
What the hell, is there some
What the hell, is there some epidemic of Protestant Work Ethic Flu going around Matt's neighborhood?
For every person sitting back drinking up their unemployment check there are two or three or ten hustling trying to get a full-time job so they can continue to pay their mortgage and not lose their house. If I am an unemployed welder or engineer I am not going to be saying "$521 per week, sweet!!", I am going to be trying to keep my skills current, and figuratively pounding the payment submitting resumes and hoping for some call backs, the last thing I need to be doing is repairing some trail in Olympic National Park out of range of any cell phone tower.
If you are unemployed you need to have daily access to your mailbox and up to the second access to your phone. People sitting in comfortable offices doing what is after all simply lucrative blogging can kiss the ass of construction trade workers who are out of work because other people in other comfortable offices decided to blow up the economy turning house mortgages into monopoly money. "Hey buddy sorry for blowing up the world economy, here's a pointed stick and a trash-bag."
I am all for a new WPA which was after all a volunteer program. But punishing the unemployed by putting them into menial outside work unrelated to their actual job skill set smacks more of the Gulag, gosh why NOT put underemployed engineers to work building a new railroad to Odessa. What is next pulling a Mao and sending all underemployed academics and policy folk to work in the countryside?
I mean is Matt all by himself trying to validate the image of the out of touch with reality liberal elite? Unemployed people are not begging for bread, they are earning a benefit gained through years of participation in the work force. In normal times six months of benefits is adequate to locate a new job if you are actually trying and the deadline serves to add a certain needed amount of urgency. These are not normal times and believe me there is plenty of urgency out there. I just took a civil service test for what is basically an entry level job. Two hundred people took the test even though there are not actually any openings and looking around the room there wasn't a lot of people just out of school. Not all those people were actually unemployed but there was more than just test anxiety in some of the faces.
Bruce Webb: "People sitting
Bruce Webb: "People sitting in comfortable offices doing what is after all simply lucrative blogging can kiss the ass of construction trade workers who are out of work ... Hey buddy sorry for blowing up the world economy, here's a pointed stick and a trash-bag. ... punishing the unemployed by putting them into menial outside work unrelated to their actual job skill set smacks more of the Gulag, gosh why NOT put underemployed engineers to work building a new railroad to Odessa."
At least to judge by the Oracle of Wikipedia it sounds like you're mischaracterizing the WPA. Are you by any chance confusing it with the CCC? Seems like many of the projects were in well populated areas. If anything there was a disproportionate number of construction workers and civil engineers. Of course now as then the bursting of the construction bubble may have made things particularly bad for those folks.
From Wikipedia:
"Total expenditures on WPA projects through June 1941, totaled approximately $11.4 billion. Over $4 billion was spent on highway, road, and street projects; more than $1 billion on public buildings, including the iconic Dock Street Theatre in Charleston, the towering Brightman Institute of Mental Health off the rocky Northern California coast, and the Timberline Lodge on Oregon's Mt. Hood; more than $1 billion on publicly owned or operated utilities; and another $1 billion on welfare projects, including sewing projects for women, the distribution of surplus commodities and school lunch projects. One construction project was the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut, the bridges of which were each designed as architecturally unique."
look at U6, not just U3
U6, the long term unemployed is at 17.5%
Those folks may need some extra help.
not sure how useful it is to
not sure how useful it is to dream up make work projects in this manner...for one thing, don't these fiolks need to be looking for work or possibly undergoing training rather than scraping bubble gum off the streets?
as well, if there was in fact all this work that needs doing, shouldn't there be more actual jobs available?
colm: "don't these fiolks
colm: "don't these fiolks need to be looking for work or possibly undergoing training rather than scraping bubble gum off the streets?"
WPA engaged in major infrastructure construction and maintenance work - it was hardly scraping bubble gum off the streets (see also my 12:14 post).
colm: "if there was in fact all this work that needs doing, shouldn't there be more actual jobs available?"
Only if there's somebody willing to pay for it. You can get a non-paying job anytime you want.
During good times, the
During good times, the government should have an office in charge of preparing "Shovel-ready" projects. This idea has been kicked around since the 1950s, but it never seems to happen.
Also, we should invest in freight trains. Merchandise moving east to west through Chicago currently has to be loaded onto trucks and carted across the city. Less than two billion dollars could fix this problem. There are other bottlenecks as well. (Source: Washington Monthly)
My understanding is the
My understanding is the subject of the WPA's efficacy was dismissed by economic historians, who concluded more people would have been helped if the WPA's budget was given as a benefit without having to work for it. Additionally, when a person is working for the WPA doing mundane and low value added work, they are not utilizing their skills, not learning new skills or not out looking for opportunities to utilize their skills.
A friend was notified he'd
A friend was notified he'd be laid off in two weeks, called an employment agency, got an interview and offer for an equivalent job the next day, then found out he could collect unemployment benefits for 65 weeks....
Unemployment is a lagging indicator, ha, ha.
ccc, wpa and youth unemployment
my father-in-law was given a CCC job (his two brothers weren't, they figured it was only one/family) and it was great for the family (he was able to send money home) and for him, he learned a lot about people different from himself (including the black guys who taught everybody about weed) and a lot of work-related skills that transferred well enough to the army after he was drafted that he became a supply sergeant, then was able to get a good job when he got out of the service, too.
i don't see any downside to bringing back a ccc or wpa especially for young workers; when one reads how many college grads can't get jobs, one wishes there were WPA programs for artists and writers, etc -- including the management and office jobs needed to run those programs, and when one reads about how much infrastructure needs repair in the US one wishes the ccc were back building and rebuilding. the small programs that do exist, the various service corps, peace corps etc. are all attracting many more applicants than can be accepted.
elisabeth
Permanent Recession
So "Nobody thinks the current recession will last for five years", huh?
Well, here's somebody who does.
Face it, other than for fat cats and speculators, we haven't been *out* of a recession since probably 1975 or so. Real wages haven't significantly risen on any sort of ongoing basis and jobs have been offshored, outsourced, and generally downsized, rightsized, smartsized, or whatever bogus HR jargon term you care to describe it by. Labor unions have been decimated and decimated again until the worker, never far up in the food chain in the best of times, has been reduced to virtual (and sometimes real) serfdom.
Yes, I know, by the definition of economics textbooks recessions come and go as GDP waxes and wanes, but economics textbooks are written by tenured professors with lifetime sinecures and little or no contact with real workers, other than the ghosts who come to empty the trash in the middle of the night.
Are *you* better off than you were twenty five . . . or even five years ago? Or are you struggling for table scraps left behind by the plutocrats at Goldman Sachs?
Hum?
The Charcoal Kingdom
If I was King of the World, I'd put every, willing, out of work, able bodied person, to work planting trees (many different species, everywhere they will grow). Trees will help stabilize rainfall and temperature in this time of changing climate. Trees will quickly remove carbon from the atmosphere. (That carbon can later be converted to charcoal and buried, removing it permanently from the atmosphere.) Trees are a useful building material. Forests are aesthetically pleasing providing natural habitat for all sorts of fauna.
Out of work people need wage paying jobs. The world needs more trees.
WPA? We wouldn't have needed
WPA?
We wouldn't have needed a WPA if, yeah I know you're going to scream, but they do brag about it, so you should stifle your screams and read, if the feminists hadn't hijacked the stimulus to put women into new jobs even if that meant men would remain unemployed.
"No Country for Burly Men
How feminist groups skewed the Obama stimulus plan towards women's jobs.
by Christina Hoff Sommers "
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/659dkr...
A "man-cession." That's what some economists are starting to call it. Of the 5.7 million jobs Americans lost between December 2007 and May 2009, nearly 80 percent had been held by men. Mark Perry, an economist at the University of Michigan, characterizes the recession as a "downturn" for women but a "catastrophe" for men.
Men are bearing the brunt of the current economic crisis because they predominate in manufacturing and construction, the hardest-hit sectors, which have lost more than 3 million jobs since December 2007. Women, by contrast, are a majority in recession-resistant fields such as education and health care, which gained 588,000 jobs during the same period. Rescuing hundreds of thousands of unemployed crane operators, welders, production line managers, and machine setters was never going to be easy. But the concerted opposition of several powerful women's groups has made it all but impossible. Consider what just happened with the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Last November, President-elect Obama addressed the devastation in the construction and manufacturing industries by proposing an ambitious New Deal-like program to rebuild the nation's infrastructure. He called for a two-year "shovel ready" stimulus program to modernize roads, bridges, schools, electrical grids, public transportation, and dams and made reinvigorating the hardest-hit sectors of the economy the goal of the legislation that would become the recovery act.
Women's groups were appalled. Grids? Dams? Opinion pieces immediately appeared in major newspapers with titles like "Where are the New Jobs for Women?" and "The Macho Stimulus Plan." A group
of "notable feminist economists" circulated a petition that quickly garnered more than 600 signatures, calling on the president-elect to add projects in health, child care, education, and social services and to "institute apprenticeships" to train women for "at least one third" of the infrastructure jobs. At the same time, more than 1,000 feminist historians signed an open letter urging Obama not to favor a "heavily male-dominated field" like construction: "We need to rebuild not only concrete and steel bridges but also human bridges." As soon as these groups became aware of each other, they formed an anti-stimulus plan action group called WEAVE-- Women's Equality Adds Value to the Economy.
The National Organization for Women (NOW), the Feminist Majority, the Institute for Women's Policy Research, and the National Women's Law Center soon joined the battle against the supposedly sexist bailout of men's jobs. At the suggestion of a staffer to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, NOW president Kim Gandy canvassed for a female equivalent of the "testosterone-laden 'shovel-ready' " terminology. ("Apron-ready" was broached but rejected.) Christina Romer, the highly regarded economist President Obama chose to chair his Council of Economic Advisers, would later say of her entrance on the political stage, "The very first email I got . . . was from a women's group saying 'We don't want this stimulus package to just create jobs for burly men.' "
No matter that those burly men were the ones who had lost most of the jobs. The president-elect's original plan was designed to stop the hemorrhaging in construction and manufacturing while investing in physical infrastructure that is indispensable for long-term economic growth. It was not a grab bag of gender-correct programs, nor was it a macho plan--the whole idea of economic stimulus is to use government spending to put idle factors of production back to work.
...
Read the whole thing, or don't read it and just continue to wonder what happened and rail at all the misogyny.
Pathetic
You need a psychologist.
Why do I need a
Why do I need a psychologist?
A) Because I reprinted portions of an article from a women's studies professor and philosopher?
B) Because I reprinted portions of that article at a forum dedicated to one point of view?
C) Because reading other points of view demonstrates the crazy?
D) Because criticizing feminists for their documented stances shows I am crazy because ?
Please elucidate, it's not clear why I need a psychologist, but out of all the ad hominems you might have chosen, I do hear echoes of authoritarianism in your suggestion that I must be mentally ill and perhaps need a forced treatment.
So why do I need a psychologist?
WPA v. The Unions
Building on Alex's comments about the WPA, they did complete many roads, bridges, buildings, and other construction projects, particularly here in the West. Picking up trash in the parks might anger public worker's unions, but proposing that the unemployed work on construction projects would anger contractors and private unions who normally build these sorts of publicly-financed projects. Facing this level of political influence, I sadly suspect that a modern WPA, and maybe a modern CCC, would never get off the ground.
It seems that at least half
It seems that at least half the commentors don't understand the difference between the WPA and the CCC.
One of the things that has been much described recently, and that those who have read the mostly excellent state guide books are familiar with, is the extent to which the WPA put trained and untrained people to work doing local history and documenting such things as slavery (there were still ex-slaves alive to interview) and early Mormon Utah (as described by Juanita Brooks in her memoirs). Not coincidentally the Utah diary project was responsible for the actual documentation of the start of the California gold rush.
There are plenty of unemployed and underemployed people with relevant academic training, plus intelligent people who are just interested, who could do similar things now. The World War II experience is pretty well documented (I think), although too much evidence probably can't be gathered too soon given the way these people are dying. On the other hand, Korea remains little known and VietNam, including the domestic front, is known more by myth that what actually happened -- and might provide real lessons. Plus for anyone who has had any involvement with local history it is notorious that the fifties are the worst documented decade in American history. (No, TV doesn't count.)
One of the fascinating things my mother told me about before she died two years ago was the role two lesbian school teachers had played in helping women grow up in the incredibly small town she lived in the rural midwest. So there's lots of work to do, particularly if we wish to escape from the tyranny of our cliches about our own recent past.
5 years? Quite possible
> Nobody thinks the current recession will last for five years,
Count me among those who think it is quite possible the recession will last for 5 more years if not more. The mortgage crisis is only about 1/3 over, with two more years of bad contracts and rollovers yet to hit and zero work done to reform the financial sector. The exurban housebuilding machine, and its associated exurban strip mall building machine, is dead and may never return. Manufacturing has been a dead issue since 1980 when Wall Street decided it should all be moved to Mexico/China. High tech companies are sending jobs to India as fast as they can; boosts the profit margin.
I don't see much light on the horizon.
Cranky
What About That Stimulus?
Drum wrote: "The federal government is good at writing checks! But, at least in the 21st century, not so good at creating nationwide jobs programs, I suspect."
________________
Oh, great, you're finally realizing that all those shovel ready jobs the stimulus was supposed to create haven't materialized and aren't forthcoming. That's what happens when the stimulus is distributed to political cronies with nothing more in mind than cementing their hold on power. Small businesses create most of the jobs and we're doing squat all to help them. In the meantime, the market is afloat on banking, new derivatives, and various healthcare and cap and trade speculation schemes. And how long is that going to last?
Hey, let's double down on the stimulus - it's all good.
What San Francisco Needs
"San Francisco had layoffs of Recreation Center staffs. San Francisco schools are laying off administrative assistants, playground monitors."
_______________
Sounds like San Fracisco needs higher taxes. That's sure to help.
Unions were very against the CCC
There was actually an excellent "American Experience" episode on PBS about the CCC. They mention that even Secretary Perkins was not happy about the CCC because of how it could undermine union wages. One way FDR got around this was putting Robert Fechner in charge of the CCC so that it got a senior union stamp of approval.
I actually also think that a CCC-style program wouldn't work as well now because the low-hanging fruit in some sense is gone. Conservation efforts have been professionalized into things like the US Forestry Service so there's no need for a CCC I think.
I thought KD thought this
I thought KD thought this was a jump to a new economy with permanent high unemployment.
I'd be OK with it if there was a public goal, a public goal that we're sucking at now, and it gave people some job training or at least some general purpose.
Unemployment insurance ain't all that. Other than raising the Nielson ratings for Oprah.
The belief that the
The belief that the government and corporate America will put Americans to work is at best an illusion. What is needed is a "level playing field" to allow small business to start up and survive. Perhaps we need to think a little more "locally" than "globally".
Useful federal pojects ...
Federal WPA projects don't have to be the Army equivalent
of moving sandbags, from one parade ground to the next.
Improving/monitoring the electrial grids, especially adding so-called
smart grids would make an excellent federal project.
So would sponsoring wind farms, and dare say, newer sodium/failsafe
nuclear reactor designs ...
Of course, keeping WWII in mind, the biggest stimulus might
just simply to invade China. iirc, cannon fodder don't
require much more than 10 weeks of training.
"Improving/monitoring the
"Improving/monitoring the electrial grids, especially adding so-called
smart grids would make an excellent federal project.
So would sponsoring wind farms, and dare say, newer sodium/failsafe
nuclear reactor designs ..."
_____________
No offense to the poster of the above, but just how many new electricians can we anticipate unions certifying anytime soon? And every alternative energy investment seems to be with research firms, where all the money goes to the idea people and nothing much else gets done.
In order to create thousands of jobs with those energy schemes, we'll need to give billions to large scale energy companies that can actually hire large numbers of people. We'll never reduce unemployment, much less make a dent in the energy equation, by scattering money amongst firms that hire a couple dozen people each.
So far, renewable energy sucks as a way to employ large numbers of people.
renewable energy ... as a way to employ large numbers
> So far, renewable energy sucks as a way to employ large numbers of people.
Truthfully, I agree with you. But putting people onto improving the
national grid has to be better than, say, employing large numbers of people to pick up trash, or some such.
And in the end, the country (might) be better off, so far as dependency on
oil (foreign oil, especially). and the all the work, won't go to outdoors
line work, or electricians alone. But regrettably, yes quite a bit of the money
probably would goto Big Energy Firms, or a handful of specialized consultants.
I would hope for some kind of trickle-down/long-term payback ,
or technology innovations (such as was derived, sort/kinda, from the Apollo moon missions)
Better still, imagine if the project could tied into a creating national broadband/fiber network, especially in rural areas.
Waiting for private enterprises to do similar projects, might take
a very long time....
And lastly/seriously, manufacturing also sucks as way of employing large
numbers of people. there's not much to recommend it as a living,
if such jobs could be automated, or done by industrial robots.
" It was a program set up to
" It was a program set up to last for years. After all, there was a Depression on."...
...and you are laboring under the fiction that this is a recession? today's unemployment reality has been three decades in the making and it will take at least that long to rectify—IF we ever do and that is a very big IF!...
"But that's not what we have today. Nobody thinks the current recession will last for five years..."
...nobody?... nobody?... really? ... you obviously haven't read any writing in the business press or read any of the prodigious writing done by economists all over the world in the last year...and I wonder if you have actually read any history at all of the great depression and how it unfolded....
historical mistakes.
1. It is historically false to say that the WPA was a vast bureaucracy. It was actually rather small and decentralized, relying mostly on existing government agencies to carry out many of its functions – the Army Corps of Engineers did the engineering work, the U.S Treasury did the payroll, the U.S Employment Service did the application process, and a lot of the planning was done by state and local governments applying for funding.
2. It is historically false to say that you need a lot of time to put together a WPA-like administration. The Civil Works Administration was announced in November of 1933. By January of 1934, 4.27 million people had been put to work. This was back when the most sophisticated administrative technology available was the carbon copy and the rotary phone.
3. Given the advance in administrative technology and organization, there is no reason why it should take longer now than it did in 1933. We have a massive network of unemployment offices who can take applications, there’s a massive shelf of infrastructure projects (to the tune of $2.2 trillion) assembled by the various engineers and mayors associations because we haven’t been doing basic maintenance for over thirty years, and by establishing a system of model projects, you can easily speed up the permit process.