Charles Peters and Timothy Noah: Four million jobs in two years? FDR did it in two months.
President Obama's $825 billion economic-stimulus package needs a lot less PWA and a lot more CWA.
The PWA was the Public Works Administration, led by Harold Ickes Sr. The CWA was the Civil Works Administration, led by Harry Hopkins. Both were New Deal agencies created in 1933 to get Americans quickly back to work at a time when unemployment reached 25 percent, its highest point in U.S. history. The PWA failed. The CWA succeeded.
The strategy behind Obama's stimulus bill resembles that of the PWA. Like the stimulus, the PWA tackled unemployment indirectly by spending money largely through private contractors. That handicap—worsened by Ickes' cautious-to-a-fault management style—resulted in only $110 million of the program's authorized $3.3 billion getting spent during the program's crucial first year. Frustrated by Ickes' poky pace, Roosevelt yielded to the pleas of his relief administrator, Harry Hopkins, to help get unemployed workers through the coming winter by putting them directly onto the federal payroll. Roosevelt had been reluctant to create a federal work program for fear of alienating organized labor. Hopkins overcame that worry by pointing out that Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor, had in 1898 proposed essentially the same idea. Roosevelt diverted not quite one-third of Ickes' PWA budget to Hopkins' CWA with the goal of putting to work 4 million people. As a percentage of the population, that would be the equivalent of putting 10 million people to work today. In his first weekly radio address, Obama pledged that the stimulus package would"save or create 3 to 4 million jobs over the next few years." (His budget director estimates that 75 percent of the money will be spent within 18 months.) Hopkins got there within two months.
The current economic downturn has yet to bring us near the depths of the Great Depression, but the situation is dire. The official unemployment rate now stands at 7.2 percent, a figure that rises to more than 13 percent when you add in people who've given up looking for work and people working part-time only because they can't find full-time work. The economy shed more jobs last year than in any single year since 1945."Three to 4 million jobs over the next few years"? With the country currently losing half a million jobs each month, that won't be fast enough....
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