Autobiography of a Nation
In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in the midst of the worst economic crisis since… (Oh wait, it was the Great Depression). Roosevelt moved quickly to establish a set of programs that he and his advisers deemed necessary to aid economic recovery of a struggling nation. Collectively, these programs became known as the “New Deal,” and gradually began to make inroads into the monetary crisis facing our nation at that time.
Today, we face a similarly dire economic climate, so what better time to examine the effectiveness of the “New Deal” programs, and see if some tenets of them might prove effective in the bleak fiscal circumstances we find today. Just so you are not disappointed with the truncated length of this entry, this will be part one in a mind-numbingly boring multi-segment study (Don’t worry I will get back to mocking things soon).
We will begin our study with the Public Works Administration or PWA. This was a massive organization that was entrusted with distributing $3.3 billion to private companies in order to complete public works projects. (A quick digression; $3.3 billion in 1933 was roughly 5.9% of the US GDP, and the Stimulus Package just signed in Denver at $787 billion is approximately 5.6% of our current GDP).
The PWA was formed to provide employment, stabilize federal purchasing power, improve public welfare and revive American industry. Almost 35,000 public works projects were completed during the PWA’s eight years of life, including construction of airports, dams, schools, hospitals, and over 25,000 affordable homes. During its heyday, the PWA provided over 2 million jobs to hardworking Americans and just as importantly (after all I am a public administration geek) helped develop a systematic protocol for distribution of funds to localities from a federal level.
So, what sorts of projects could we concentrate on with a huge influx of government money into private R&D firms; (and lets think beyond developing a PDA that is even more totally awesome than an I-Phone) efficient desalinization plants, more solar energy farms, improved hybrid technologies, miracle of miracles; develop a way to teach people in LA how to drive when there is one tenth of one percent of rain on the ground. Improved infrastructure would be great as well, but the Bonneville Dam (Important PWA project) of 2009 is not another dam or hospital, it is technology.
to be continued…
