You are suggesting allocating workers from the whole pool of workers. i am not. I suggest contracts to get the infrastructure mended be handed out. Those contracts would have to hire American workers and buy American products in the building. American steel, nails , barrels, ..American everything. That would create the demand that is missing from our present economy.
How about the car companies that are still around continue making the cars and the government restarts the WPA public works programs and they repair the infrastructure and do other public works projects, just like before. Minimum wage plus health care and housing, and basic training if the person hired hasn’t done whatever previously. Seems like it worked once before, Ford made cars, the government built roads, bridges, dams … :dubious:
Aruq,
If a gov’t program has for explicit goal to employ people, it will do just that, even when marginal gain is below marginal cost. If the gov’t gets involved in the business of repairing infrastructure, it should be because that’s the best use of available resources, not because there are people who are unemployed.
Or to say it another way:
Q: How many WPA workers does it take to screw in a a lightbuilb?
A:However many are unemployed.
Gonzo,
You are aware that demand and unemployed are related but still distinct, right? What leads you to believe there is unsufficient demand?
The insufficient demand argument is often relate to Keynes. Can you explain the Keynesian argument to me? How does it relate to savings, liquidity traps, inflation and nominal vs real wages?
In June 2011, inflation was 3.6%. That’s not insufficient aggregate demand, unless you think the gov’t should increase inflation until there’s no unemployment. You were around in the 70s when there was stagflation, right?
Correction:
“You are aware that demand and unemployed” should read :“You are aware that demand and unemployment”.
Here is a more realistic plan, devalue your dollar (cost of imports goes up, cost of exports goes down), and reduce the minimum wage. Makes manufacturing in the US cheaper for exports and imports more expensive, so more goods would also be made for local consumption instead of cheap imports instead. When the dollar drops low enough it will be cheaper for Walmart to get stuff made in Alabama or South Dakota than import from China.
Effectively thats what’s going to happen anyway, it’s just not really planned, just the market correcting itself to take care of the little issue of the US massive overspending for the last 20 years.
I just stumbled across this thread. The OP demonstrates a typical lefty’s understanding of economics. In other words, none. Unfortunately, it exactly matches the typical righty’s understanding of the subject. Conclusion? Our nation is doomed. IPU help us all!!!one!!!
This thread is too stupid for words, but I can’t let this one go. I worked as a construction inspector, on road jobs, among other things.
Running an asphalt paver is actually highly skilled work. I’ve seen many long-time operators do incredibly stupid things. Your average “young healthy high school slacker” CANNOT do it. At all. He doesn’t have the required skills, yet. Even the guys you see behind the paver with rakes, smoothing the stuff (just before the highly skilled roller operators get on it) are doing something I tried once (there were 10 minutes to kill before I had to do my highly skilled job again) and found out it’s a lot harder than those highly skilled guys make it look. NONE of those jobs are easy. They all require skills that the “young healthy high school slacker” just doesn’t have.
1000 untrained monkeys-with-shovels are never going to accomplish what 1 skilled construction worker can easily do in 10 minutes.
Whenever people talk of the government creating jobs, people jump to infrastructure construction jobs as if it were 1930.
Construction doesn’t need constuction workers anymore. It needs an army of lawyers and a lot of heavy equipment (and for the hyperbole impaired, a handful of construction workers too).
I don’t think most people realize how difficult it is to get permission to build something. There are environmental impact reports, zoning laws, eminent domain, and multiple legal challenges on all.
You probably think all that red tape can be cut through because THESE projects are for the good of the people instead of for dirty and corrupt profit motive. But government projects also get caught in competing lawsuits between (mostly) progressive causes. I can think of several local examples.
Replacing an aging and inefficient bridge? One here has been in the works for a decade as local groups squabble with the gov’t over the number of lanes. Building light rail? Reliably progressive institutions, the university and the NPR station, sued because they didn’t want light rail near their facilities. Building alternative energy or a “smart grid”? Just don’t expect to be able to build transmission lines anytime in the near future. Parts of Wisconsin are littered with signs (many home made) against the building of some power line.
Employment will have returned before you could get these people to work.
Lastly, infrastructure projects have expensive materials. I believe in general this costs more than the labor. So, the costs of the program (for the construction parts) just doubled.
I don’t think anyone noticed your post. Perhaps a few cites will help:
We’ve tried this before and we still seem to have a thriving capitalistic society.
The average federal employee isn’t digging ditches.
I noticed it and addressed it in the post directly before yours. Three problems:
[ul]
[li]Public works projects take years just to get approval. [/li][li]Large scale public works (i.e. dams) are unlikely to ever be built[/li][li]Do you really think the average American is up for the rigors of a construction job?[/li][/ul]
[QUOTE=Damuri Ajashi]
The average federal employee isn’t digging ditches.
[/QUOTE]
And? Your point being that you intend to hire millions of ditch diggers and put them on the Federal pay roll? Seriously? Where will they dig these ditches? Do you suppose that people who build roads and bridges are generally ditch diggers (in American) these days??? 
Or that you are going to pay these people, what? Minimum wage? With no benefits??
Again, it comes back to what are you going to have these folks actually doing and what are you going to pay them? Are you going to give them standard federal employee benefits or not? Are they going to be exempt or non-exempt employees? Temporary or permanent? Is this going to be a one size fits all (i.e. ‘Here is the job <digging ditches>, take it or leave it!’) or are you going to allow these millions of unemployed to use their former skills and experience in order to get jobs doing something remotely like what they have experience doing?
And, again, where is the money going to come from? How are you going to pay for this? Just saying ‘well, we’ll just raise taxes on the rich’ or ‘well, we’ll just borrow the money as we always do’ isn’t good enough…you are talking about a permanent increase in the annual federal budget…and a really, really big one. And one that will increase over time, assuming you plan to give these folks raises and such down the road, and assuming you don’t plan to simply cut millions loose a year or two down the road when you figure out that ‘Hey! This stuff is really expensive!’.
-XT
Federal employees are not allowed to go on strike. I don’t think they can negotiate for wages either. These “automatic” wage increases must be affirmatively passed by congress each year as part of the budget.
Leaving aside the wisdom of increasing the size of the civilian federal workforce over tenfold…
The ranks of the unemployed do not really match the profile of the ranks of the federal workforce.
The federal benefits package is not worth anywhere near what you seem to suggest.
There is a field of study called economics that covers this pretty well. Ever hear of Keynes or are von Mises and Hayek mainstream economists in your world?
Because it creates humongous deficits and is really only something you would use during something like the great depression.
I think wage inflation is part of the point behind Yog’s post.
The bottom of the federal pay scale is about 18K/year. I don’t know if anyone gets paid that much but its on the schedule.
You can get fired for being bad at your job, its just harder, not impossible. During your first year of federal, you are on probation and its pretty easy to fire you.
You get fired for missing your tour of duty.
You would get fired.
You have a very warped view of the federal workforce. There are a lot of federal employees around here and I deal with govt attorneys on a regular basis and I have not noticed this sort of behaviour.
They are not consuming wealth; its wealth distribution, either through taxation or through inflation. If we can keep our trade deficit under control, it should create some velocity in the economy.
[QUOTE=Damuri Ajashi]
The ranks of the unemployed do not really match the profile of the ranks of the federal workforce.
[/QUOTE]
Even assuming that’s true, you should probably take that up with the OP, not me. It’s not MY plan, after all.
I’m unsure what your cite is supposed to prove…or is even in response too. I never said federal workers were overpaid, nor even made a comment about what they are paid one way or the other. I merely pointed out that the average federal worker makes between $65-$70k per year, and so that would be a good baseline to use for quick, back of the envelope calculations to try and put things in perspective as far as what the OPs plan would cost. And that’s the unloaded rate. Even if you are planning to hire all of these folks at half of the current annual salary of the average federal worker you will still have to pay the cost loading which will double or even triple the actual costs…unless you (well, the OP I suppose) plan to pay all these folks an hourly wage with absolutely no benefits, including increased HR costs, which I doubt.
Cite? The standard loaded costs for a worker are around double his or her salary. I can’t imagine that federal workers are magically immune to this. Consider just the expanded HR costs to process and manage 12 million new workers. I think I’m actually understating what the costs would be by at least 1 to 2 times, honestly. However, if you have some other data to back up your assertion I’m certainly willing to hear it.
I’m vaguely familiar with the names, yes. Why don’t you produce some cites that show any of them claiming that massive increases in the federal work force will act as a spur to economic growth.
During the Great Depression the federal government didn’t expand by nearly 12 times, so this would be completely uncharted territory. Humongous deficits doesn’t even begin to describe the costs here, because you would be paying this pretty much forever…unless you plan to massively lay off all those happy federal workers down the road, which would have all sorts of other bad effects.
-XT
The monopoly on first class mail is STILL a very important part of the postal service business model.