Debate on Creating Jobs

As we are in such difficult times with many parallels to the Depression, we can now draw yet another one. It seems the Obama administration has turned its domestic hands away from health care to shift its gears to the creation of jobs with tactics such as “packaging new proposals for tax incentives and construction projects to promote employment”. Why they plan this is due to the expiration of the Stimulus Package at the end of December which would end extended unemployment benefits.
Now let's turn back to the Depression. It starts with the Progressives like Woodrow Wilson. Their administration put forth an effort to support small businesses. Their main accompishments include a beginning of some of the labor reforms that we have today (8 hour days, unemployment benefits and “living wages”). Their attempts at economic stabilization didn’t work as well as expected, but set the ground for the unemployment benefits.
Let's fast forward to Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. Economic troubles are still alive and unemployment is the main consequence. What FDR had done is propose and run many government ran institutions to give jobs as a way to distribute wealth back to the unemployed. From these policies we get the PWA,CWA, and TVA, all components of the “Hundred Days”. It gave public works jobs that provided work for the unemployed. We come to know this government intervention as “The New Deal”. After the fall of those programs, more government initiatives came out of the “Second New Deal”. The WPA was aimed at government jobs in construction of bridges and roads. It also employed people in professions other than manual or factory labor, including those in the arts.
Draw the parallels. At the end of this stimulus package, we still have economic troubles and high unemployment as a result. This reflects the attempts made by the Progressive movement and the establishment of the unemployment benefit system. Our standard of living is still too high for some people and the “living wages” we have today barely make the cut.
Now to this article. As done in the 1930s, our government tried to support the unemployed with benefits, now we attempt to do it with government jobs. Will it work? In the 1930s, the public works programs worked for the most part. Unemployment was on the decline and the economy was on the rise. But we will never know if it was truly effective. The Depression ended mainly due to our efforts in WWII and the rise of our military powers. So it can’t really be said whether or not the New Deal would’ve worked in the end.
One last parallel: the Wagner act was established as a part of the Second New Deal. It gave protection to workers to be able to unionize and as a result, we find the rise of the AFL and the CIO branching from it. In the 50s, the two came together to form the AFL-CIO (well -inspired name). Included in the Obama administration’s debate of federal jobs is the AFL-CIO. So far they have been proposing 5-point plans that may work. Not much for me to say on that, but thought it was an interesting fact.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/us/politics/30jobs.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper