New Deal Democrat and Bonddad (economic bloggers) just wrote up a policy recommendation, Do We Need Another WPA.
It's really out of the box and finally, the focus is on the U.S. labor force, the U.S. worker and critical, income, the middle class.
I believe that the U.S. cannot afford another "jobless recovery" as is not projected and until the focus is on the U.S. labor force, jobs...I frankly do not believe we will see a recovery at all because squeezing the middle class has gone past the tipping point.
I hope others read this, it's a really good analysis as to why we need a massive jobs program, focused on the U.S. worker.
Well, of course, I couldn't agree more. Indeed, it's my opinion that this should have been part of the initial stimulus package, although I didn't write about it then. In fact, just after the stimulus passed, I happened to hear an NPR segment in which they talked to two Republicans who voted for Obama in Colorado, and one of them was complaining that they didn't include a "WPA-type of program" as I think he put it. He complained that they were just putting money in to ordinary government spending programs, when a New Deal-style jobs program would have been better.
A Republican for Obama said that! And if I'm not mistaken he was even a former GOP activist on a local level. Regardless, I think we shouldn't be surprised to get support from a lot of folks that Versailles doesn't think would like it, as I explain on the flip, after an excerpt from the post itself.
There's a pervasive frame that when times get tough, we've got to tighten our belts. Just as families cut back on niceties like vacations in the Bahamas, the government needs to cut back on frills like Medicare and Social Security. But while this might make some sense for families (it depends), it's nonsense for the government.
The reason is simple. Like it or not, our economy works because of a constant flow of money -- when you buy vacations, money goes to the airlines, who use it to hire airport staff and buy planes, which means more people building airplanes, who means more people building airplane parts, which means more people building machine tools, and so on. There's a word for what happens when all these people cut back: a recession. The money dries up, suddenly folks find themselves out of a job, and everybody left has to take a paycut to "stay competitive".
Belt-tightening means pulling even more money out, which means even more jobless and weakened. The only way to get things moving again is if the government counteracts these trends by investing -- getting more money into the economy so that it starts bulking up instead of cutting back.
This is what we learned during the Great Depression -- Herbert Hoover's fiscal austerity did little, but FDR's Works Progress Administration got America going by paying folks to build public buildings, write books, distribute food, and so on. Many of their books and buildings can still be seen today.
This is why moderators' questions about "what will you cut back on in a recession?" are nonsense -- the real question is what will we expand with? Will we get the economy going again by creating thousands of new green jobs or starting a new Apollo Program to create clean energy instead of a man on the moon? Or, as John McCain proposes, will we give it all away in tax breaks to the wealthy? We need to know, because one thing is clear: we can't afford another Hoover.
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