"Brother Can You Spare a Dime" - Tom Waits
Crazy busy today, but I did want to suggest that in the face of the passivity by Democrats regarding joblessness -- and especially yesterday's hideous quote from Claire McCaskill -- there is a counter-narrative that they could embrace. It would not get enacted, but it would at least suggest to the electorate that there is another approach that could be taken.
As my friend Tim Noah likes to point out, with the blessing of FDR, Harry Hopkins put four million Americans to work in four months through the Civil Works Administration. The CWA lasted only from November 1933 through March 31, 1934. But in that brief period, the federal government directly put to work what would be the equivalent of ten million workers today. Hopkins then went on to run the Works Progress Administration("WPA"), which at its height employed 3.5 million people and spent the equivalent of 6.7% of GDP in 1935. In today's economy, that would require spending about $938 billion annually on a comparable program.
In other words, there really is an alternative vision that could be presented to the American electorate about what to do with the problem of unemployment. And it's one that made the Democratic Party the natural governing majority party in the United States for a period of about forty years.
Alright, must get to work myself.
Share whatever is on your minds today.
