It's Friday Night! Party Time! Time to relax, put your feet up on the couch, lay back, and watch some detailed videos on economic policy!
Considering today's double digit unemployment rate, I thought looking at government run employment programs of the past might be a good place to start. PBS, (a really crappy video site, no embedding) has a documentary of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal jobs program, online. Click below to watch:
One on the FDIC & SEC:
Here are some FDR speeches on economic policy. If only we had such cut and dried direction today.
A good place to start researching on New Deal jobs programs would be this wikipedia article on the New Deal. Each New Deal economic program is listed with it's criticisms, successes, problems. Watch out for conservative re-writing history on the New Deal. The reality is these programs got people employed, trained and working.
Comments
good objective to creations of WPA here
here. He notes we don't have a war effort to draw people away from WPA style jobs, no future job innovation either.
He has an interesting point. I think the idea would be #1 to offer training and #2, make each job like enlisting in the army. The longest it will last is 2 yrs for the most part...
but that's yet another very tricky point on gov. run jobs programs.
It looks like the 1930's, at least the CCC didn't have any slackers, but the WPA has been criticized for being slacker heaven.