Digging ditches and filling them up again is not production. Building unneeded things just to employ people is not production.

And public works require taxation. Every dollar spent on public works is a dollar that cannot be used in the private sector.

And that's exactly what the WPA was. It was makework political shite.

The WPA was NEVER sold as a production project. It was sold as an employment bill.

This post was edited on 5/19/14 at 5:34 pm

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Posted by HailHailtoMichigan!

Mission Viejo, CA

Member since Mar 2012

69491 posts

Posted on 5/19/14 at 5:33 pm to HailHailtoMichigan!

quote:
At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”

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Posted by Rex

Here, there, and nowhere

Member since Sep 2004

66001 posts

Posted on 5/19/14 at 5:39 pm to HailHailtoMichigan!

quote:
And that's exactly what the WPA was. It was makework political shite.

Several buildings exist on the LSU campus, and many hundreds in productive use exist elsewhere, because of the WPA. So where are you getting this "makework" nonsense?

In a country where roads and bridges are crumbling I'd hardly worry about people being employed to do unnecessary things. And we no longer employ a WPA model, anyway. Stimulus money for public works is contracted out to private enterprise.

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