Word: wpa
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Hire More People to Work for the Government Perhaps the easiest way for the government to create jobs is for it to create government jobs. The example quoted most often: the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA), which during the late 1930s employed more than 8 million people. The jobs were project-based and largely in construction - we got a lot of highways and airports out of it - but also occasionally in professional fields such as teaching, nursing and writing. (See 10 ways your job will change...
...money. It's a classic chicken-or-egg problem. Direct hiring by the government could, theoretically, sidestep the impasse. The question then becomes whether such a program creates more economic benefit than it does economic inefficiency by having the government dictate job creation. Consider that one criticism of the WPA was that it prevented people from moving to jobs where they would have been more economically productive - and actually slowed down the post-Depression recovery...
Still, the dime baggers don't stand a chance. So it is the Federal Government's responsibility to help with some sort of bailout. They need seed money. They need a WPA's worth of pastry chefs to make pot brownies. They need Snoop Dogg to pass on his genes to even more children. They need to get the 3-D version of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs on DVD right away...
...WPA - the largest New Deal program, employing 8.5 million people and spending $11 billion on public projects nationwide - was a real jobs program. More than 80% of its budget was dedicated to labor. In a speech at LSU in 1936, the WPA's legendary head, Harry Hopkins, gave a cogent synopsis of his agency's deep effect on the nation. "You can start out from Baton Rouge in any direction and pass through town after town which has water facilities or sewer facilities or roads or streets or sidewalks or better public buildings, which it would not have...
...Deal, they did everything they could think of to get people paychecks," says Alice Rivlin, a Brookings Institution scholar and former head of the Office of Management and Budget. "For example, there were WPA projects for artists and writers. In the 1970s, we put people to work during recessions doing useful things. These were mostly lower-skills jobs such as teaching assistants, home health-care workers and cleaning up parks. A similar program today could help a great deal with the high level of unemployment among young people...