I just saw a news story about how many jobs the F-35 program has created. The F-35 has been a ridiculous boondoggle since day one. FDR put people to work building things like the Hoover Dam. Why can’t we do that today? We have plenty of infrastructure that needs work. Renewable energy could also create a lot of jobs.
Canada has decided to run deficit budgets for at least the next 3 years to invest in infrastructure.
Quebec was just given $80 million for post-secondary building repairs.
I’m not thrilled about running deficit budgets, but at least these are the sorts of projects that government should be helping with.
The reason why government spending will be for weapon systems, and not infrastructure, is because the current majority party is convinced that giving more money to rich people, will cause them to hire poor people to make things and offer services to people who have no money to pay for any of them.
In 2009 the University of Massachusetts did a study on how many jobs are created from $1 billion in federal spending in different areas. These are the results.
https://timemilitary.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/jobs.png?w=360
Military spending was near the bottom. I cannot find the actual study online, just that chart. I’m not sure how stable or well paying the jobs are though.
I personally liked the CCC and the WPA - both nonmilitary, and both working for the population through sponsoring artists [some KILLER murals got painted, many of which are gone now] and infrastructure [though the CCC still existed in the 70s, one summer a couple friends of mine were with the CCC repairing stone fencing in Letchworth State Park.]
I got this drivel once when I commented that we should bring back the CCC and WPA - “But they would need to be able to use heavy equipment for roadwork” and all I could think of is how fast the SeaBees can train a basic boot to use heavy equipment. I think my heavy forklift course was all of a week. I don’t see why they can’t build in a training period, the programs ARE to provide work and infrastructure repair … what is the big deal over plopping people in a training camp in the middle of nowhere with lots of equipment and having them shift dirt and rock around.
Oh, boffking, why not just open a debate on whether or not it’s more efficient to create jobs by government spending than by private sector spending? We both know that’s where this little discussion will head eventually.
One camp thinks that what the Democrats did in the '30s saved the nation from a really, really deep depression. Another camp thinks that what the Democrats did in the '30s extended the Depression by years and years; the intervention of World War II, with spending focused on production of military equipment (and technological advances), combined with the need to employ millions of soldiers was what brought the economy out of the deep doldrums. Some people think that it was a mix of reasons.
Not shockingly, the two camps don’t really see eye-to-eye on much economically. The answer to your question will depend in large part on where someone stands in this larger debate.
I believe more people benefit from domestic spending than from military, and some may use said benefits to expand their businesses. Spending government money on energy technologies for example, could lead to cheaper energy, thus more manufacturing businesses.
Spending a billion dollars on an airport expansion can create a commerce boom in a city, and many lasting businesses. Spending a billion dollars on building a Navy ship does not have those benefits. Once the construction is done, the ship sails away, and many of the construction jobs are over.
An excellent point. Once Trump eliminates the EPA, we probably will be able to! It’s a good thing we elected him!!
The prime goal of military spending is not to create jobs. Jobs are the prime argument why military spending should not be cut. Do you understand the difference?
I don’t necessarily think we should look at military contracts or infrastructure spending as primarily job creators. Infrastructure is a long term investment in America’s future, and a robust infrastructure leads to economic gains in various areas that aren’t always apparent, but it has a huge impact over time.
Military contracts can often have a similar effect, because there is a lot of genuine technological progress made through the development of specialty equipment for the military. Things like rocket technology, navigation, communications, have all received technological advances from military spending. But just like with infrastructure being valuable for infrastructure sake, there is always some value to military spending regardless of its ancillary effects in creating jobs and progressing technology. Namely there is some level of societal benefit in being able to defend American interests around the globe, and there is inarguable benefit to being able to robustly defend yourself from foreign aggressors. The latter isn’t very controversial, although most would agree, given the nuclear shield and the Atlantic Ocean, we spend far more than we would if we were solely interested in just self defense. The benefits of being able to defend and promote (impose our will) interests abroad is highly controversial. Obviously there are some really beneficial trading relationships that have been buoyed in part by military deployments overseas. We do a lot of business with South Korea, Japan, and Western Europe, through entities that we sunk many billions of dollars into defending from very real outside threat at various points in the Cold War. Even though it’s unlikely they’d have been able to hold onto it, it’s hard to argue America isn’t in a better place today because the Russians never took West Germany. It’s likewise hard to argue we haven’t benefited from a fully independent Japan (without American protection it’s hard to say what would’ve happened after World War II, with Japan’s empire and military destroyed, and a super angry China next door and an expansionist Russia that had already gobbled up some northern Japanese islands), and I have little reason to think South Korea would even exist today independently from the Kim Stalinist monarchy if not for our intervention in the Korean War and subsequent commitment to South Korean security.
But there are obvious counter-points, too, for example American military adventurism and meddling in other’s affairs almost certainly created an Iran that went from being an ally and trading partner to a very unpleasant country with a lot of animosity to us.
Infrastructure is I believe a better investment. Let’s upgrade the power grid to minimize power outages, let’s build fiber optic lines to every house and have high speed internet access available to all. Let’s build high speed rail lines, invest in our roads and bridges, build new schools in the cities.
The thing that people forget is that the money spent on these things doesn’t stop with those things. The construction workers, suppliers, miners, and so on don’t just salt their paychecks away. They pay taxes which reduce the real cost of the projects, they buy cars and houses and eat out and put other people to work who also pay their taxes. So some of that tax money used on the projects comes right back to the treasury. The people who get put to work directly or indirectly strengthen the economy. Having more reliable power and transportation makes the nation more competitive in the world marketplace.
But… hang on a minute.
One party thinks that economic stimulus based on government spending helped end the depression.
The other party thinks that a different kind of economic stimulus based on government spending ended the depression.
Isn’t that kind of a pretty substantial surrender from the “government can’t create jobs” position? It took massive government spending AND employment to get us out of the great depression. Whether or not you think the New Deal helped (from what I can tell, the consensus seems to be that it was too little and taken away too soon), the fact is that what pulled the US out of the depression for good was a massive amount of government deficit spending, primarily on industry and federal hiring - in other words, a stimulus package of the kind the private sector could not possibly have provided.
IMO the .Gov shouldn’t be in the “job creation business”.
The purpose of our Federal Government is to defend our borders, provide for national security.
It was also intended to uphold the rule of law of our Republic.(secure liberty)
That’s it. “Job creation”. Isn’t part of it unless it’s part of those two things. And “job creation” should never be an objective to it meeting it’s duties. That is simply a benefit if it occurs.
Everything else that it gets its tentacles into it screws up, and undermines the first two.
The government should not be doing those things to “Create jobs,” though. It should be doing those things to fix roads and buildings.
Irrespective of the country’s deficit, stuff has to be fixed when it has to be fixed. As it happens, people will get work out of it, but that’s a side benefit.
Similarly, at some point in the near future Canada will build 15-20 new missile destroyers (euphemistically called “Surface Combatants” for some reason) for the Navy. That will inevitably create a great many jobs, but they’re not doing it to create jobs, they’re doing it so that Canada has the ability to engage in combat on the high seas and have warships better able shoot down planes and sink other ships and submarines. The jobs are a side benefit.
I’m not of the mindset that the government’s role is to create jobs, or that it’s even really in its power outside of direct creation of public jobs or government contracts. That said, if it were between more big, possibly boondoggle military projects and infrastructure projects, I’d definitely prefer the latter.
More so than the jobs, though, the effects on individuals of the infrastructure projects under FDR were the job training they received. Infrastructure jobs are largely temporary if I understand correctly, but the skills these people have gained can be used to gain or create private sector jobs that they couldn’t have done otherwise.
You claim that’s its purpose. Given that this is a constitutional democracy, and the constitution clearly calls for the government to uphold general welfare, and given that there’s a pretty solid majority supporting the government being in the job creation business, I’d say your claim is simply outvoted.
Why should the federal government limit itself to those things? There are a lot of things beyond those two issues that need doing, which either are best done or can only be done by our government. Universal education and literacy, for example, is a clear public good which private enterprise can’t really supply on its own. Having roads exist solely via the free market is also kind of a nonsensical proposal, and we saw the result of utilities like electricity being able to be entirely market-based in the past, when electricity companies refused service to rural areas, citing economic infeasibility. When I see your post, what I think of is a carpenter who has to stick two boards together but refuses to use screws out of philosophical reasons, even when the screws are the right tool for the job. Sometimes, the government is the right tool for the job. Sometimes, the government is the only tool for the job.
Nonsense. The 2009 stimulus worked. The bank bailout prevented a complete meltdown of our financial system. Social Security is and remains a crucially important method of preventing poverty among the elderly. Medicare is far more efficient than any private ensurer. FEMA does an excellent job of disaster management when it’s not staffed by some random know-nothing the president owed a favor to. The government’s green energy investment program is in the black, created thousands of jobs, and helped promote renewable green energy sources that otherwise may very well have floundered and failed. Glass-Steagall did an excellent job of staving off another liquidity trap recession, right up until it got repealed. Just to name a few examples.
The government can do a damn good job at a lot of things no other organization can… if the people running it want it to. The question then, in my eyes, is why the hell you would ever decide to give control of it over to people who claim that it can’t work. All they’re going to do is prove themselves right by cocking everything up.
The case for government creating jobs is that during periods of high unemployment there is a resource going idle that the government can borrow money to use when the private sector is not.
There is no economic reason to think that government could or should create jobs when unemployment is low. If the government pursued infrastructure projects when unemployment was low it would not be employing those who are out of work but merely transferring the employment from the private sector to the public sector. Given that private sector work is done for economic reasons and government work is done for political reasons it is likely that switching jobs from private sector work to government work would cause less economic benefits to the country.
Any infrastructure work done by the government at the current time should only be done because of a positive return on investment and not for economic stimulus reasons.
Yeah, if the infrastructure needs fixing, fix it. The problem with the government “creating jobs” is that it takes so long for projects to get approved that the government is likely to miss the cycle of when jobs “need” to be created vs when they don’t. As per above, can you imagine the approval process today of building a Hoover Damn? We’d be lucky to break ground 20 years hence. See: “shovel ready projects”.
Even more simply, the Constitution gives the Federal government the power to regulate the value of money. Even though this is now delegated to the Federal Reserve, tinkering with interest rates to fine-tune the economy – and balancing growth, inflation, and job creation in the process – is a routine part of government operations since, well, probably forever.
A lot of the infrastructure is owned by the government so ongoing maintenance, repair, and replacement projects will always be needed. Also, the government doesn’t do the work, it’s generally contracted out. Yes, private business, the only people that conservatives believe matter, are the ones that do it.