The Case for a New WPA | Hacker News Reader

The Case for a New WPA

theatlantic.com

43 points8sigma31 comments

> During the recession, the stimulus bill authorized $1.3 billion for subsidized employment programs in 39 states.

I'm reminded about how much we've wasted bombing and rebuilding the infrastructure in foreign lands. Think of what we could have built if we invested the deficit here.

> Subsidized employment programs “really help get money into the pockets of some of the hardest-hit families,”

It gets tricky here because even most liberal or conservative ideologies agree that working is good, and government-created demand for work is fine. It gets hairy when we start to spitball exactly how that demand should come.

What may work for both sides? Find out how to create the most demand with the least amount of long-term dependance. Let's start talking about avoiding the second part while encouraging the first.

The right certainly demonizes those who don't/can't work more than the left so I'm not sure your equivalency tells the whole story.

Also, working is good now but what happens when jobs become increasingly automated? I don't think it's too far fetched to predict that automation could take the place of most of the jobs on this chart: http://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2014/occupations/images/chart_0... in the next 50-150 years. What happens to our opinion of work when many people can't work?

> The right certainly demonizes those who don't/can't work more than the left so I'm not sure your equivalency tells the whole story.

Well yes, but how is that relevant to what he said: "even most liberal or conservative ideologies agree that working is good"?

The point was that work and willingness to work are almost universally seen as good in American politics.

Like I said, it puts them on the same level which doesn't tell the whole story. Right and left agree that working is good, but if you can't/don't work, one side will hold you up as an example of a moral failing of character to be stigmatized and one side won't.

The Works Progress Administration (renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration; WPA) was the largest and most ambitious American New Deal agency, employing millions of unemployed people (mostly unskilled men) to carry out public works projects,[1] including the construction of public buildings and roads. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration

While there is a lot of general cleanup work to do in some places, there probably isn't enough manual labor to go around. There are machines that grade and pave roads with amazing efficiency. A new WPA would probably have a large training element since health care, assisting teachers, etc. are the areas that need the most headcount.

Plus this could get us over the downside of shrinking the surveillance state, prison industrial complex, Homeland "Security," etc. If there is a fallback program that always has jobs on offer, the need to create jobs more expensively declines.

Even during the original WPA, I suspect that a lot of the labor was borderline make work. AKA building a stone bridge for a hiking trail in a national park wasn't the most efficient way to cross a stream even back then.

One possible wrinkle: my understanding is that most WPA workers eventually transitioned to blue-color manufacturing work in the post-war era. And so the WPA was able to be disbanded without any political fallout.

Given the decline of manufacturing jobs and the transition from blue-collar to service oriented work, wouldn't a modern WPA be more permanent? If a MWPA job is the equivalent of most low-wage service-sector jobs, what's the incentive to transition to the private sector? We would be creating a environment for MWPA "lifers" - a significant percentage of the electorate that depends on a MWPA for a living.

That's not necessarily bad. But a UBI (Universal Basic Income) would make more sense. It would be better to have a program (UBI) that doesn't have the additional overhead of vetting, training, and administrating a national-scale job training and employment program. A UBI provides more bang for each government buck.

You can subsidize jobs for a few billion dollars a year. If it makes sense to do it, we should do it, not hold out for a radical several trillion dollar change to the federal budget.

The first step to a UBI is universal healthcare, or at least substantially cheaper healthcare. How close are we to that politically?

The problem is that government doesn't have low hanging fruits any more. There are enough highways. Building more doesn't yeld that much GDP and you don't need that many workers.

Spending on make-work projects would probably be GDP negative at this point. The diminishing returns on such projects have probably completely diminished. Everyone has roads, electricity, plumbing, etc.

I recall reading an article about how lots of suburbs underbuilt on infrasstructure and now need new investment, but can't muster up enough political will to impose the taxes needed to pay for it.

A lot of suburbs shouldn't exist, and aren't willing to pay to take of even the basics. It's a ticking time bomb.

We could get rid of lead pipes.

(which is relatively specialized work that is happening anyway; it isn't all that specialized, but digging with a machine is incredibly more effective)

Getting rid of lead pipes would do little. Flint is a special case because the city did not add the proper anti-corrosion chemicals to the system when they switched water supplies. Probably every old city in the nation still has lead pipes, but most have properly coated the pipes with treatment so there is little to no lead leaching into drinking water. Of course there are exceptions, but it's not widespread.

Railways, maintenance, public transit, electric grid upgrades and expansions, there are a ton of public works projects that could be done.

But how much of that can be done by unskilled laborers? And will any public sector unions allow it to be done? Why not just funnel the money to the existing government agencies? I'd imagine it might be possible to require that they hire new employees too.

no need to split hairs. block grants to state and local public works is essentially the same as a national WPA, for purposes of the article.

Not true at all. American infrastructure desperately needs to be rebuilt.

http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org

https://hbr.org/2015/05/what-it-will-take-to-fix-americas-cr...

http://www.vice.com/read/america-is-collapsing-a-brief-look-...

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/falling-apart-america-neglected-...

http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/19/opinions/blumenauer-renacci-in...

http://www.nssga.org/case-missed-60-minutes-falling-apart-am...

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/american_prosperity...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/america-s-crumbling-infrastructur...

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-us-economy-is-under-...

* Courtesy the American Society of Civil Engineers

There are many projects that need to be done, but they won't hire 10% of the workforce and product massive GDP.

The gold mine main deposit is gone and you have to drill in other directions.

How about declaring high-speed (Gigabit plus) Internet access a human right and running fiber to everyone?

That would likely cause our GDP to explode.

For a while I was hoping they meant wi-fi. We sure as hell need WPA3, with some decent security for a change (for example, preventing everyone who knows the key from snooping and injecting traffic or getting rid of this DEAUTH nonsense).

As someone who until recently knew next to nothing about networking, it's been a real eye opener reading up on it and discovering how shitty everything is. WPA supplicant because people didn't think to make it secure in the first place. Deauth "attacks" - well, if you can even call it an attack. "Kick everyone off this network now".."ok!". "Uhh.. how do I stop that?" "You can't". Some real bozos put this shit together, didn't they? Can we start again please, and do it properly this time?

Link looks broken, try http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/subsidiz...

am i the only one thinking of wireless protected access?

same thought came to my mind, thought it would be a strange article to be on theatlantic.. WPA3!

We are $19.2TN in debt. Six percent of federal income is spent directly on interest on that debt, to the tune of $222BN annually. That money goes directly into the pockets of big banks, many of them foreign.

It sure would be nice if that could be spent differently! But unfortunately, we keep spending money we don't have!

This is completely ignorant. The federal government is an issuer of currency and therefore has infinite amounts of money . We are no longer on the gold standard where money was limited by gold reserves. Making and repeating these kind of FUD statements which reinforce a false analogy that federal budgets are like household budgets is keeping many bad politicians in business .

How am I implying or reinforcing the idea that our federal budget is analogous to a household budget? There is no FUD here.

> This is completely ignorant. The federal government is an issuer of currency and therefore has infinite amounts of money . We are no longer on the gold standard where money was limited by gold reserves.

That's a tautology. We are only an issuer of currency insofar as we have credit. Our credit rating is heavily dependent on our ability to make interest payments, which are $222BN annually.

Now maybe what you're saying is that since we can issue more currency, we will never be unable to make these payments because US debt is denominated in US dollars. And sure, that's technically true, but absolutely no one in America comes out ahead after that. Americans are the people most invested in the future of the dollar-- particularly lower and middle class Americans who have savings accounts and retirement funds that are mostly denominated in US dollars, whereas rich people hold capital assets.

So that doesn't address my point, which is that right now we have an expenditure of $222BN annually and we're obligated to make those payments or face some consequences that are much greater.

And all I'm saying is that it would have been really great if we didn't have to spend those $222BN every year. And what would be less great, but still great, is if we could start moving that number down.

>but absolutely no one in America comes out ahead after that. Huh ?

Anyway. You need to educate yourself. Read up on Modern Monetary Theory. You continue to make analogies between household budget constraints and money issuer budget constraints. Money issuers have no budget constraints. The only constraint is inflation and policy makers the world over have been try to create inflation for 25 years. ( see japan, europe, usa post 2008).

Government debt == private sector savings. Eliminating government debt would lead to another great depression. It makes no sense for a country like ours which is a net importer. Again, you're empowering the politicians with this FUD.

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