FDR got it right.
At the height of the Great Depression the Roosevelt administration created the Works Project Administration. According to Wikipedia:
“…. the WPA provided jobs and income to the unemployed during the Great Depression in the United States, while developing infrastructure to support the current and future society.
Above all, the WPA hired workers and craftsmen who were mainly employed in building streets. Thus, under the leadership of the WPA, more than 1 million km of streets and over 10,000 bridges were built, in addition to many airports and much housing.”
The current administration (a misnomer, I grant you) thinks that giving people money is the way out of their dramatic loss in income. After all, the average American has savings between $2,729 and $15,589 which, on the face of it is as close to zero as makes no difference. Americans need to relearn the meaning of thrift and stop looking for handouts. They also need productive jobs, not clerical positions selling sportswear. A new WPA would put them to work rebuilding all those rotting roads and bridges and, hey, learning to use a shovel is easier than using a supermarket scanner. Their labors would recapitalize America and, with related efforts, deleverage a society addicted to debt.
Instead, what we see is this sort of shocking image. A line of SUVs awaiting handouts of food at a food bank:
You can sleep in a car but you cannot drive a house.
Leverage? Those SUVs are all financed, of course, and the credit cards of those drivers are earning some usurious lender 21% annually. So while we put Americans back to work wielding shovels, let’s cap credit card lines and limit interest to 4%, which will neatly transfer the pain from the borrower to the lender.
As a photographer it’s not lost on me that the greatest burst of documentary photography the world has seen was at the behest of FDR’s Farm Security Administration whose Roy Stryker hired the best of the best to tour America and document the depredations of the Great Depression. We should recreate that organization in these troubled times, too. Lest we forget.
In a couple of legislative actions we get safe roads and bridges and a revitalized nation, which beats useless malls and unnecessary ‘discretionary’ spending.