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

[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.