* Triborough Bridge
* Griffith observatory in LA
* LaGuardia
* LAX
Is this really worse than those market-driven jobs created to harass people to pay debts, build McMansions where nobody wants them or create social networking sites for dogs?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration
Civil engineering has become massively mechanised, so the vast majority of jobs in the industry are highly skilled. A job that would have needed 200 men back in the '30s is now done by three men and a giant machine.
Make-work is make-work, however you slice it. We could choose to build bridges and roads like they did in the '30s and create millions of jobs. We could also impose vast tariffs on imported cloth and ban automatic looms, creating millions of jobs in the textile industry. Philosophically, it's no different to paying people to dig holes.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/american-infrastructure-fallin...
Severely restricted fiscal spending got converted into tax cuts for the wealthy. Necessary work didn't get done. Robots were made a convenient scapegoat for that process, probably because of their natural immunity to pitchforks.
The US is getting leapfrogged by poorer countries like China on infrastructure largely because of this process.
And I say that as someone who is generally pro-union.
And yet the Empire State Building was erected in a year. Faster than any comparable modern structure.
The alternative is UBI, which should cost under $20K per body, and would give people an alternative to accepting a BS market-driven job just to put food on the table.
UBI might only cost $20k plus admin costs per recipient, but as you're paying it to well over 20x as many people it's well over 4x the cost. And you don't get the hole...
I'm not convinced Basic Job programmes are a fully scalable welfare replacement, or that agriculture or construction work would be a particularly good focus for a more limited workfare programme, or that advocates of such ideas have necessarily considered the risk of crowding out paid work at proper salaries, but the idea that indiscriminately doling out money to people irrespective of whether they've indicated they might want it is cheaper than welfare state alternatives is palpably false.