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

[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.