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

[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.