It is September 2011, and Speaker of the House John Boehner is making an important statement on the subject of our flagging economy. He is dressed in a dark suit and one of those luminous ties for which he is renowned; the monotone of his voice says solidity, predictability, the sort of consummate, reassuring dullness it must take a lifetime of Rotary meetings to perfect. It is actually difficult to pay attention to him.
But what he has to say is startling. Boehner never uses the word “unemployment” in his remarks; instead he focuses on the “job creator,” that figure before whom heaven and nature must learn to bow. Here is the true object of our concern, our pity. Here is the part of our society that has broken down—and not, mind you, because of any misbehaviour by the job creator. In fact, the responsibility for his failure is largely ours.
One of the reasons job creators aren’t doing their thing, Boehner explained, is that they had been “slammed by uncertainty from the constant threat of new taxes, out-of-control spending, and unnecessary regulation from a government that’s always micromanaging, meddling, and manipulating.” It was this last infraction—excessive regulation— that drew most of Boehner’s ire, and as the Speaker spoke, the indictment lengthened. Not only were “intrusion and micromanagement” by Big Brother causing job creators to rend their garments in frustration. These things were also, in Boehner’s view, the source of the great economic slump itself.
If you could shake off the fog, you might appreciate the postmodern leap the man was making. Camouflaged in his respectability costume, this supremely ordinary citizen was yanking history loose from its moorings and flying in the face of known fact: our present hard times, he was asserting, were caused by too much regulation. And the righteous fury of the job creator at this imaginary imposition was described by Boehner with a daring phrase. “Job creators in America, basically, are on strike,” he said. In other words, they’re sick of the big-government b.s., and they’re folding up their wallets and standing pat until the bureaucrats snap into conformity with the grand narrative that the job creators imagine to rule the world.
Of course, we in Washington know that Boehner was speaking merely for effect. In fact, my money says that some smart assistant inserted this whole “strike” business into his speech as a shout-out to the base. If you can remember all the way back to the days when the Tea Party was first feeling its orange pekoe, you will recall that a strike by businessmen was the central theme of the book that the movement regarded with almost scriptural awe: Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
But what if we hardened Beltway types didn’t just blow off Boehner’s language as another empty metaphor? Perhaps we should take him at his word this time. Perhaps business-people really are sitting on their be-hinds until the world gives them precisely what they want.
The tactic is common enough these days. It worked for Wall Street back in 2008, when bankers essentially told government to make with the bailout billions toot sweet or else Atlas would walk away from his burden. It worked again last summer when small-government types engineered the debt-ceiling fiasco. And here is the Speaker of the House telling us that this manner of governing is here to stay.
Now, when workers strike and shut down, say, the nation’s coal mines, Republicans traditionally scream for Taft-Hartley injunctions and sometimes even demand that the National Guard be mobilised. And the situation today is considerably worse than it would be during a coal walkout. But even while urging us to think of this job-creation tantrum as a strike, Speaker Boehner did not ask for any of those measures this time around. Instead he simply reminded his audience that only the private sector is gifted with the power to create jobs.
This is such a shibboleth among Republican politicians that to hear it is to yawn, to move a few comfortable inches deeper into somnolence. But then the Speaker said something that caused me to shake my head and rub the sleep out of my eyes. The building in which he was talking, he pointed out, “is named in memory of former president Ronald Reagan, who recognised that private-sector job creators are at the heart of our economy. And they always have been.”
In point of fact, the Ronald Reagan Building is the opposite of a monument to free enterprise and private-sector job creation. The gigantic structure, completed in 1998, is the second-largest federal office building after the Pentagon. It was built under the supervision of the General Services Administration, on a scale so inflated that the former president’s son Michael once called it “Mount Waste-more.” Had this palace’s existence been left entirely up to the private sector and the unfettered market, it would not be here. The jobs involved in its construction would not have been created at all.
The opulence of the Reagan Building is ordinarily regarded as one of Washington’s many ironies. But maybe the contradiction isn’t as great as we think. Rhetoric aside, Ronald Reagan was a world champion deficit spender. Read his memoir, An American Life, and you will also find Reagan referring to the Works Progress Administration, among the biggest government jobs programs of all time, as “one of the most productive elements” of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Read accounts of Reagan’s tenure as California governor and you will find him proposing, in 1971, that a WPA-style public works program replace the state’s welfare apparatus. Read the 1987 biography of the former president written by Garry Wills, and you will discover that Reagan’s father, Jack, spent some of the worst months of the Thirties as a low-level official for the WPA’s predecessor, the Civil Works Administration.
Here, if we are willing to see it, is a story that might prove instructive as we grapple with a second breakdown of our economic system. We can let people who are out of work languish on unemployment insurance, a program that didn’t exist in the 1930s, or we can count on food stamps to see them through. But if we are so concerned about job creation, why not just create jobs? It’s not an impossibility, despite the lessons intoned so soberly by Speaker Boehner and his colleagues.
Just look at the Civil Works Administration, Jack Reagan’s employer, set up in November 1933 as a desperate nation headed into its fifth Depression winter. To create jobs, the CWA did not offer tax breaks or fine-tune the regulatory climate. No, the CWA simply hired unemployed people and put them to work. It was organised virtually overnight, and it did not wait for grand projects to be fleshed out: it simply sent people out into the nation’s public spaces to rake leaves, shovel snow, fix roads, dig ditches, and so on. The program’s administrator, Roosevelt confidant Harry Hopkins, had famously spent more than $5 million in his first two hours as a federal official. At the CWA, he found jobs for 4 million people in two months.
Although it would be a brain-stopping system error to acknowledge it nowadays, these achievements would probably make Harry Hopkins— bleeding-heart, government-loving, unelected super bureaucrat Harry Hopkins—the all-time greatest job creator in American history. Yes, his manic spending infuriated laissez-faire purists of 1933 just as much as the Obama Administration’s deficits bother such people today. But his tactics worked. The WPA, which Hopkins ran from 1935 to 1938, ultimately created about 3 million jobs per year. The Civilian Conservation Corps, which sent an army of young men to build up the national parks and to plant trees during the Dust Bowl, employed another 3 million over the course of its life, from 1933 to 1942.
We do not remember these programs as evidence of a national flirtation with communism. By and large, the things they built are treasured today. Indeed, there was a genius and a grandeur to their far-flung labours. The Roosevelt Administration dealt with unemployment by putting murals in post offices, by bringing electricity to deepest Appalachia, by paying artists to paint, theatre directors to stage plays, and penniless authors to assemble collections of folklore and write a famous -series of guidebooks.
I myself went to an elementary school built by the WPA in suburban Johnson County, Kansas; galloping down its oversize halls in the dark days of the 1970s, I used to think of Roosevelt-era Americans as a lost race of builders, the Romans of the New World. New Deal programs had a prominent role in building many of the monumental civic buildings in nearby Kansas City, Missouri. The CCC laid out the roads and trails in the national parks where my family vacationed. Thirty miles down the road from KC, in Excelsior Springs, the WPA built an elegant hydrotherapy shrine called the Hall of Waters—and then commissioned the Missouri guidebook that brought this extraordinary Art Deco structure to my attention years later, after I picked up a copy in a junk store. And they did these things during the worst decade of them all.
We are now heading into winter number five of the lesser slump commonly known as the Great Recession. Unemployment remains at around 9 percent; if you count people who have stopped looking and people who are stuck with part-time jobs, it’s more than 15 percent. The private-sector job creators who we pray daily might come to our rescue are not interested in the errand, either for obvious business reasons or because they are, in the words of Speaker Boehner, on strike until they get their way.
We have waited for them long enough. It is time we took the business of job creation into our own hands.
The idea has been raised a number of times since the 2008 election. In both 2010 and 2011, Representative George Miller of California proposed making $100 billion in grants to local governments for the purpose of hiring additional workers. Earlier this year, Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois proposed an even larger measure that would directly hire construction workers, teachers, and health-care providers. And in September, Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey introduced the “21st Century WPA Act.” His own father, he told me, had held a job with the original WPA, and the reasoning behind his new proposal was straightforward. You “turn on the faucet,” as Lautenberg put it, “and the water comes out.” With a budget of $250 billion for the next two years, the resurrected agency would automatically shut itself down should the employment rate drop below 6 percent.
These proposals are not radical or complicated. They are, however, extremely unlikely to be enacted. Even among Democrats, there is little agreement on the desirability of federal jobs programs; for the most part, the party long ago accepted the small-government ideal of the G.O.P., outsourcing, downsizing, and deregulating with relish when it was their turn to rule in the 1990s. Over the past two years, they have tried to bring about recovery with tax breaks, bailouts, and big paydays for private contractors. Even the president’s Council on Jobs is filled with CEOs.
In the present climate, it would probably be easier to round up a congressional majority for a declaration of war on Greece than it would be to get funding for a new federal works program. These days, we don’t paint new murals for official buildings; we tear the old ones down because they offend the free-market convictions of sensitive men like the governor of Maine. We don’t build new highways and bridges; we sell off the existing ones to private companies that operate them for a profit, in the manner of the Indiana Toll Road or the Chicago Skyway. We don’t add to government payrolls; our state-level leaders are using the Great Recession as an opportunity to lay people off, to attack unions, and to holler with outrage about the generous pensions that public workers receive. And just imagine the waves of Obama hate that would sweep the nation the first time Fox News managed to film some works-program beneficiary leaning on a shovel he’s supposed to be using to fill a pothole.
Still, it’s not hard to see how a resourceful politician might play things differently. After all, the original WPA is one of the handful of government programs that Americans of almost all political stripes seem to remember fondly—even as a moment of national greatness. There’s also something profoundly attractive about the idea that we can control our own economic fate, rather than waiting upon the whims of those self-designated job creators.
And then there’s the fact that direct government hiring would, you know, work. “Compared to almost any tax cut, the employment impact of direct federal hiring is far superior,” I was told by Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute. And as the economist Kevin Hassett, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, assured a congressional panel in 2010, “If the economic stimulus moneys were spent directly hiring individuals, they would have created twenty-one million jobs.”
Hassett went on to explain how federal money might be used to subsidize private-sector hiring. But with a little imagination, we can get even more direct than that. Just by reading the literature on the subject and asking my friends, I was able to come up with a number of labor-intensive projects that a hard-driving official of the Harry Hopkins type, coordinating with local authorities across the nation, could get people started on in a matter of weeks. He could, for example, dispatch battalions of workers to wage the war against Asian carp. He could send them into the nation’s libraries to scan old newspapers and periodicals and make these universally available online. He could have people disassemble derelict McMansions by hand while carefully salvaging the sinks, toilets, and granite counter-tops. He could pay out-of-work journalists to start covering state and municipal governments again. He could build out high-speed Internet to every tiny hamlet on the Great Plains. He could send thousands of unemployed construction workers to perform the deferred maintenance on every bedraggled public-school building in the nation. And when they’re done with that, they could descend on the nation’s capital and fix every broken escalator in the Metro system.
Besides, proposing such a program would immediately put the Boehners of the world in a surpassingly difficult spot. Let us acknowledge the challenge the Speaker has posed to the mightiest nation on earth. Let us debate the problem until it is familiar to every adult in the land. Maybe we will find, as Mr. Boehner says, that we must hand America’s job creators yet another fat tax concession, or grant them the right to dump toxic waste down their kitchen sink, or (who knows?) send each one of them a Hallmark card festooned with delicate expressions of our gratitude. But my guess is that the nation, if asked, would skip the card and gently tell its benefactors to go to hell. ■
- Thomas Frank
