Ever wonder where your tax dollars ought to go?

[pecunium]

Brad Hicks explains it all for you

The WPA is what we need.

I don't think you can come up with a single dollar of WPA spending that actually counts as wasted, not a single WPA "make-work" project so pointless and stupid that we didn't get our money's worth out of it, especially if you count all the on-the-job job skills training it gave the 8 or 9 million people who went through the program. And that's even if you don't factor in the analysis of very serious historians who question whether or not American "G.I.s" would have fought so hard or so well to save the world from 1941 to 1945 if they had been as resentful, and as starving, as they were in 1930. But no, the blunt fact of history is that if the truth were ever told about the WPA, if the truth hadn't been being smothered in lies by the same political factions that opposed it at the time all the way up to this very day, everybody would know what the WPA proved as inescapable facts. No dollar of government spending is wasted, if it does a job that nobody else was going to do and it builds something that lasts. Almost nobody is so greedy and lazy that they actually would prefer to be paid to stay home and watch TV or get drunk or stoned all day; there are untold tens of millions of us now that no employer would touch for any of a long list of bad reasons who would rather be working. And no matter how lazy you think they are, boredom is a powerful motivator, and so is a desire not to let down your team, and so is a desire not to look bad in front of others: bring 'em to work, leave 'em alone, and nearly all of them actually will work, will actually build things that are built well, built for the ages, built to last. Paradoxically, the really wasted money is the money that gets spent on government overseers determined to make sure that none of the workers waste any money: point people at jobs, give 'em simple hand tools, and tell them to take their time and build something solid and it's almost impossible for us to not get that money back in long-term savings.

Comments

[janetl.livejournal.com]

Well put! We need to keep saying this sort of thing. There's actually a letter to the editor in today's Oregonian that compares the $500,000 limit on the salaries of CEOs whose companies got federal bailouts to Stalin. Seriously.

[faithwallis.livejournal.com]

I found you through another person's blog...

My grandfather was a member of the Civilian Conservation Corps. I can't help but think that his life's work was born there and in his time on the farm. He spent his days after the CCC as a carpenter, finishing the interiors of such great buildings as the Prudential Building in Chicago, either O'Hare or Midway airport (not remembering which at this point), some of the labs at Bell Telephone, and some of Chicago's high schools....and those were just the jobs I knew about. Nothing was lost by giving the man a job to go work on some of our national parks (from what I have been told, that's what he did...I would have to verify)...nothing at all. It probably taught him his trade...or at least honed his skills.

President Roosevelt, from all I've read about him, was the correct president for his time. I wish people could see that some of that might just be useful now.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Amen. Here in the Pacific Northwest, the WPA and the Civilian Conservation Corps built a huge chunk of the transportation infrastructure we still use today, from Highway 101 up the coastline to the Columbia Gorge Highway, as well as dozens of beautiful, functional bridges that remain in service today - some of which are now on the National Register of Historic Places. WPA artisans and craftsmen were responsible for much of the most enduring and beautiful architecture in Portland. It could be argued that without the New Deal, this entire region of the country would not be what it is today.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

I can't help but notice that many sections of your country seem to be very low on water fountains and public toilets. I mean, if you're looking for stuff to build.

[zeeth_kyrah]

Since we tend to spend a lot of money and effort sending water from "wet" states to dry ones, straining all the aquifers in the nation, just so rich people and casinos can have fountains in drought-stricken or desert regions, I don't see the point in more public fountains.

But public toilets, yeah. That would be a boon, as long as there was someone to clean them.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

I think we may be having a confusion of terms, here. I mean drinking fountains.

Which could be built in any quantity that could possibly be wanted by the population and still be less of a drain on your aquifers - and, indeed, ours, as we export a disturbing amount of bottled water to the US - by truck, while we're trashing the environment - than the bottled-water industry which is presently replacing the free and safe drinking fountains of yesteryear with water of often rather lower quality (do look up the minimum purity standards for the stuff; it'll have you reaching for the gin) and infinitely greater price.

And the public toilets should, of course, be dual-flush. :-)

[zeeth_kyrah]

I just looked up dual-flush toilets. An excellent idea, though the easily embarrassed will need to have lots of well-attested soundproofing or the usual electronic noisemaker (as found on Japanese super-toilets), or we'll just end up with a long stream of Half-Flushes with a Full-Flush finish. Or two, just to hide when something really happened.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Here (in Canada) they seem to work without any problem.

In public venues, once comprehended, I see no problem using them in the states. Worst case, no one uses the lower volume; things remain the same.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I have to protest that there's a high probability that more than a few dollars of WPA money were wasted, at least in some sense. I have (still reasonably clear) memories of my father coming home in the evenings in the mid-1930's from his WPA laboring job (they had many more shovels than openings for tool&die-making machinists) and complaining that many of his co-workers loafed excessively on the job. (Actually, he didn't say "excessively", but he wasn't the kind of person who'd consider his own brief rests as being "loafing", and he tended to pace his labor so his energy lasted for the entire work-period, without regard for whether or not the Boss was looking.)

That said, I agree with the substance of the article you quote -- the WPA and the CCC may well have been "make-work Projects", perhaps even with a considerable amount of pork in them, but they overwhelmingly resulted in infrastructure constructions that were useful and beneficial to society (then and in some instances lasting until today) -- and this in addition to paying the workers enough to keep their families modestly-well housed and fed.

(I note, by the way, that the (previous) Great Depression didn't seriously hit us until six or seven years after the Stock Market Crash of '29, and that we didn't see it as being over (for us) until about 1939, so I don't see much prospect of the current one ameliorating significantly in less than a decade, especially considering the inadequate measures now being adopted.)

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

At one level it might be said the wages of those who were loafing weren't the best used, but the dollars they got were spent in the local markets, and the sense that one was earning the money, rather than being propped up for nothing, is; even when the worker is able to make it more notional than factual, still a useful prop to the ego.

One doesn't like to feel useless, and that sense of being "good for nothing" is one of the hardest to overcome in those who have been long unemployed.

So it kept them from being a drain on local resources, and kept them from feeling useless. Money well spent.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

And well spent in another way as well, as I look at it. One of the bad aspects -- perhaps the worst -- of a society with a large percentage of its populace barely-surviving at poverty-level is that the children born into this economic level (and there will be a lot of them) will have their health and mental & emotional development adversely affected by inadequate nutrition and education. Starting about twenty years later, and continuing for at least forty years after that, this will, inevitably, result in that society having a much smaller pool of Human Resources to draw upon for its sustenance and growth, if it is to grow and improve. [Not that poverty (which, itself, is relative) _necessarily_ results in useless people (those who don't contribute at least as much to the social whole as they take from it) on the individual level -- there are many examples to the contrary -- but I think there's persuasive evidence that it applies on the statistical/percentage level.]

[calcinations.livejournal.com]

Hey, you just described areas of the UK after the devastation of the 1980's recessions. We are still seeing the damage, although quite a few areas have improved.

[janetl.livejournal.com]

BTW, of course some money was wasted in WPA or CCC projects, and will be in the new stimulus projects. Perfect efficiency is impossible. I've worked in private industry all my life, and if I had a penny for every dollar I've seen "hard nosed entrepreneurs" blow on silly ideas, I'd be comfortably retired. Mind you, while I wouldn't have made the same mistakes they did, I'd have made some of my own, different, stupid decisions, and wasted some money myself.
Local government had a software project miss its scheduled finish date awhile ago, and a newspaper editorial called for putting together an advisory board of local high tech managers to advise the government to prevent this in future. I wrote a letter to the editor (not published) saying that if they could find some software executives who had never had one of their projects go over schedule and budget, I'd love to meet them!

[firepower.livejournal.com]

This is well said.

And, OP, the deep desire we have as Americans to punish our countrymen is inexplicable but you can't ignore it. We're not Swedes, you know.

[daedala.livejournal.com]

That's the thing I don't understand most. What is this "punishment" thing? I mean, we grumble about punishing the executives but don't do hardly anything about it; but when it comes to people just like us, we'll by god make sure they pay for being...just like us, but not as lucky.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Some of that is lumpism, some of it is envy, some of it is the sense (which relates to the lumping) of people, "getting what they deserve."

We see goups as definable. So the "poor" must be shiftless and lazy. We don't want to reward them for being poor (there is some of that in the conversation starting here and bit more later, where Americans, in general, are called lazy; by an American).

We see those who "made it" as meritorious (look at the myth of Bill Gates, "Harvard drop-out" who left to sart a company with $100,000 his father gave him. Yes, he worked, and he had good timing, and he got a little lucky... he might just as well have failed... but how many people had fathers who could drop a hundred grand on them... to quit Harvard?) even they aren't.

People like that must be special. Special people don't deserve to be handled roughly, and all they did was, "make a mistake." The hidden narrative is, that, "market forcees" caused the banks to fail, but a good worker will keep her job.

So the guy out of work is at fault, and so less deserving of sympathy.

I think some of it also "magical" thinking. If we make the unemployed working stiff "other", then we can't have it happen to us, because we aren't a member of the, "other".

We also have this aversion to raising the bottom. Reagan's, "rising" tide wasn't really based on making the bottom higher, but on pulling the top further out... and dragging some of the bottom along. Which is (as studies show) backwards. Give the mass more money and they spend it. They spend it in ways which makes for more work (the meat, and milk and bread, and clothes, and the like take a lot more people than the personal trainers and nannies and two vacations a year require... sorry, I don't have a huge amount of sympathy for spendthrifts who receive multi-million dollar annual salaries, and tell me I need to scrimp, but that not taking two vacations; at $16,000 per is more hardship tham mortals should bear, so a $500,000 salary cap; when funded by taxpayer bailouts, is unacceptable, but I digress).

So the narrative of "self-sufficiency" (plausible when the larder was fillable with a rifle, and the hides could be used to buy the powder to get the meat, but not so much when one is an urban, or sub-urban, creature), combined with the idea Providence will, "shape our ends, rough hew them as we will", and the idea that the wealthy, "make things happen" and to punish them is to kill the goose laying the golden eggs.

And now I've gotten lost, becauase there's also the sense that, "they didn't hurt anyone (i.e. use violence) so to send them to prison would be, "unfair" and a symbolic shaming is enough to keep others from doing the same.

Well it isn't, and that it's not being done (actually punishing people for breaking laws... if the laws are about money) pisses me off.

[daedala.livejournal.com]

I'm just glad my schadenfreude gene is cranky, not vicious. Sigh.

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

I agree. My expectation at this point is that some of the new energy infrastructure we need will be built by people working in today's equivalent programs. It's what makes sense to me, anyway.