WyBlog

Democrats propose a rebirth of the WPA

Maybe House Democrats really do think we're in a depression. Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) is proposing a massive new economic stimulus plan to pump billions of tax dollars into infrastructure projects and budget relief for state and local governments. It's a rebirth of FDR's depression-era Works Progress Administration, a gigantic government bureaucracy which built bridges, roads, schools, and libraries around the country during the 1930s.

It sounds like a good idea, right? The WPA was the employer of last resort; anyone needing a job was hired by it. It eventually became the largest employer in the nation. Is that what we want in 2008? Government already employs millions of Americans. Adding millions more to the government employment rolls will only serve to cement Americans' reliance on ever increasing bureaucratic munificence. Millions of new government employees will be prime targets for union organizing; AFSCME and the CWA will salivate at the prospect of signing up so many new members. And once those new employees are unionized it will become impossible to return them to the public sector. Add in the trillions of dollars in pension and health care liabilities they will accrue and we have set the stage for a round of tax hikes that will cripple our economy for generations.

Then there is the problem of what exactly this new WPA will build. Our country is not like the 1930s anymore. There aren't vast swaths of open land ripe for development. New construction now requires a laborious process of government permit approvals and environmental impact studies. It's easy to say that this new program will provide money to repair our aging infrastructure; it's another thing entirely to sit around and wait while the Sierra Club sues to stop construction on behalf of some turtles. Road widening and bridge repair projects now take years to get off the ground. So the immediate beneficiaries of this new program won't be any of the millions of unemployed Americans; it will be the army of consultants, lawyers, engineers, and expert witnesses brought in to defend the projects and guide them through multiple regulatory minefields.

Just like with the case of the Schools Construction Corp. here in New Jersey, by the time one of Congressman Frank's new projects gets approved the money to pay for it will be long gone, eaten up by fees paid out during the permitting and approval process. I don't see that as being useful to stimulate our economy in the near term.

Posted at 22:55 by Chris   []   | | Perm Link |