George “F for Farrreeeky!” Will has a piece up, “Infrastructure projects aren’t jobs programs”, which, all inadvertently, explains why infrastructure projects are jobs programs. Saith St. George,
“New Deal public works gave the nation splendidly useful engineering marvels, including the Golden Gate Bridge and the Hoover Dam. It did not, however, significantly reduce unemployment, which never fell below 14 percent until prewar military spending began.”
Well, gee, George, if spending billions on splendidly useless things like battleships ended the Great Depression (and it did), why wouldn’t spending billions on splendidly useful ones do the trick?
The only problem with the New Deal’s infrastructure program was that it wasn’t nearly splendid enough. Why weren’t the Interstates built in 1935 instead of 1955? Or how about a triple track transcontinental railroad running from New York to San Francisco that was, you know, perfectly straight and level, so that you could travel coast to coast in, say, twenty-four hours!1
The problem, of course, is that it’s politically impossible to spend “real money” except for defense. Roosevelt’s peak New Deal budget, for 1936, when the economy grew by 9 percent, was about $8.2 billion, falling to $7.5 billion in 1937 and $6.8 billion in 1938. The defense build-up began in 1939, when spending hit $9.1 billion, jumping to almost $14 billion in 1941 and “vaulting” to over $35 billion in 1942, peaking at an almost inconceivable $92 billion in 1945. Is it “crazy” to think that a couple of $13 billion budgets in 1937 and 1938 might have ended the Depression, and significantly enhanced the productivity and efficiency of the American economy, without the staggering cost of World War II?2
So what’s the moral for the present day? For George, of course, it’s that Donald Trump shouldn’t get all New Dealy on our asses. And it’s my moral that he should.
Afterwords
I think that, overall, Trump will do what Ronald Reagan and George Bush did—hand out massive tax cuts to the rich and spend a great deal of money on defense. Republicans like to believe that defense spending “doesn’t count”, because “we have to spend it”. That doesn’t make any sense, but it lets them spend/waste large amounts of money with a good conscience, and that’s all that counts. George Will supported Reagan’s enormous, and entirely unnecessary, increases in defense spending, to “rebuild” our military, which was actually fine the way it was. I remember, after the 1980 election, during which Reagan bellowed endlessly about our “hollow” military, a congressional hearing at which a member of the Joint Chiefs was asked point blank by a Democrat whether, if given a choice, he would prefer having the U.S. or Soviet deterrence package. After hemming and hawing for an appropriate length of time, the embarrassed brass hat confessed that Uncle Sam had it over the Russian bear.
Afterwords II
What about those “millions of manufacturing jobs” that Trump is going to bring back to the Midwest? Well, he’s already got a thousand of them from Carrier Air Conditioner, right? Or at least he’s only lost a thousand, which is better than losing two thousand, right? I think Trump will be under a lot of pressure to do something dramatic—in part because he has to do something dramatic, or he isn’t Donald Trump—but I don’t know what it will be. In the best of all possible worlds, which we don’t seem to be living in, we’ll get something resembling what the Republicans wouldn’t give to Obama.
Afterwords III
George naturally trashes President Obama’s stimulus package, which was itself undersized, due to the frenzied opposition of the entire Republican Party from Day 1 of Obama’s administration. Once they gained a majority in the House of Representatives, of course, the Republicans actively set out to wreck the U.S. economy and continued their efforts throughout the president’s two terms, only giving up when the deficits about which they screamed so hysterically began to decline—thanks to Obama, not to them. Well, George can’t be expected to remember everything.
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By train or car, the trip from East to West is 3,000 miles, but only 2,400 as the crow flies. Back in the day, the Milwaukee Road’s Hiawatha streamliners, drawn by steam engines and running between Chicago and Minneapolis, regularly topped the magic speed of 100 MPH, taking advantage of the flat Midwestern terrain. My dad rode on them. The club cars had speedometers, and when the train hit 100 everyone would (of course) have a drink. The good old days! ↩︎
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I am, of course, not arguing that ending the Great Depression in the U.S. would have prevented the war. The greatest obstacle to “real” countercyclical spending during the New Deal was Roosevelt himself, who believed that deficit spending led inevitably to inflation. Roosevelt’s instinctive fears were strongly seconded by Federal Reserve Chair Marriner Eccles. As far as I can tell, none of the New Dealers had the nerve to dream “really big.” They were obsessed by “overproduction”. There seemed to be too much of everything. The idea that demand could ever catch up with production seemed insane to them, or rather unthinkable, since they never thought of it. They believed that the age of growth was over. ↩︎
