Well, for one thing, there was already a bridge there. New public works projects have a long period of regulatory approval and public comment - this was not needed in the case of an existing structure to the same degree.
To the degree that public comment was required for the new span - this was expedited and citizen comments were incorporated quickly. These included making the new bridge light-rail ready. Doing this forestalled any lawsuits from aggravated parties.
Lastly, in following links from your cite, it seems financial incentives were wisely built into the contract to ensure quick completion, and the bridge didn’t need traffic planning, flagmen and the like since the old bridge was gone.
Lastly, the bridge was built by experienced bridge contractors. A CCC couldn’t have built this bridge. Even during the New Deal CCC projects were of a smaller scale than this. And the WPA wouldn’t have built the bridge quickly - they were rather infamous for their inefficiency. Running jokes at the time said the WPA stood for “We Poke Along,” “We Piddle Around,” or “Whistle Piss and Argue.”
So this case was in many ways atypical, and shouldn’t be the example we measure public works projects against. While I would agree that we might learn some things from this project and its fast completion, those lessons won’t apply across the board.
Well then, I’m not quite as ignorant of the Great Depression as I had just feared, which is quite the relief. I knew that things had been terrible at the beginning of the 30’s, and then got slowly better due to several factors, but I had thought that the key to ending it altogether was the US getting into WWII – massive spending on the military and on factories producing materiel for the war effort, plus employment as GIs for so many men, plus employment at said factories for so many others, plus a goodly amount of the rest of the developed world dealing with the devastation of war = Profit! Plus superpower status in the decades to come.
I’d always thought that a big part of the exit from the Depression was the Lend Lease program where we sold big, expensive weapons to other world powers. Lend-Lease only started in 1941, but England and Russia were getting nervous many years before that.
So maybe the trick is getting other countries to bop each other over the head and then selling them the big sticks.
Not really. We never really expected to get any of the lend-leased equipment back. The UK, China and Russia were in no position to pay for much of it anyway.
Most repayments took the form of barter: permission to set up military bases on UK territories, etc.
The US set a new record high GDP in 1936. FDR’s new deal had reduced unemployment from 25% to 15% in 1936 (or under 10% if you don’t count as unemployed those people who actually were employed by New Deal workfare programs).
When do you want to argue that industrial production building up to WWII began? I’d suggest not prior to 1939. Do you want to suggest that it happened before the Anschluss in 1938?
I’ll give her a pass on that one. It’s actually .03%. I could see how you might get mixed up with decimals vs %, and not notice that both were employed. Kinda like that .02 cents thing with the phone company. Of course a reasonable person would realize their mistake and be embarrassed.
But for the rest, yeah. Bat shit crazy. If only we could get her hooked on crack cocaine and make a reality TV show out of it.
I’m curious. Just HOW batshit crazy would Bachman have to get before rank and file Republicans spoke up and disowned her?
Is she close to the line now? Not even close?
My take is that she has a lot farther to go before most voting Republicans would say anything. (especially given the mass defection of “middle of the road” republicans away from the party)
I’d say she’d have to call a national press conference for “matters of urgent national security”, and then on live TV to a huge audience, appear in a suit made entirely of Saran Wrap, and call upon all right minded Americans to throw off the yolk of the evil Lizard People who are currently running the world.
I would agree – 1939 as the earliest that preparations for war could have affected the US economy, with the major effects after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
I’m realizing that I need to brush up on my history in a serious way. This is new information for me. Thanks!
With Specter’s defection this week and the ground they’ve already lost, she could probably safely defecate on the White House lawn in front of a battery of cameras and have job security. I’m going to go with “on camera murder of an infant” before they’d start to divide.
No, I sure didn’t. The point I was contending was the argument that the US “got slowly better” and didn’t recover until WWII. The New Deal led to rapid and direct improvements that persisted until FDR was swayed to curtail his new deal recovery programs in favor of pushing for a balanced budget. He did, and the economy faltered, providing a nice A-B-A real world experimental test of the effects of government spending versus tight fiscal policy during severe economic downturns.
I forget nothing. It isn’t as if the Republicans had a lock on economic wisdom in this era - the Smoot-Hawley tariff is proof of that alone. Still, I think modern liberals tend to look toward the New Deal way too often as inspiration, since when pressed they will generally admit that they wouldn’t want specific New Deal methods employed today.
Admit it, Hentor, would you be comfortable with a modern-day NRA that kept prices artificially high, propped up big firms at the expense of small business and employed poorly planned but ruthlessly enforced regulation to keep things going? How would this work in our economy?
