Look, if you want to pay the long-term unemployed to go pick up trash in the park or something, I might be on-board with something like that. After all, I’m generally supportive of the idea of work requirements for welfare, and that would probably close enough that it bears at least some consideration. But please, keep them away from the bridges and drinking water systems. I don’t want my kids’ schools built by a company whose main credential was the number of long-term unemployed people they managed to hire.
Well, the “this idea” from the first question, and the “this” from the second question both refer to Bernie’s proposal, so understanding it seems relevant. YMMV.
Also, regarding his second bullet point, I sure as fuck don’t want to turn my kids over to some government-run make-work daycare program (recognizing that public schools are sometimes uncomfortably close to this).
So you couldn’t defend the Republicans on the first question so you are fighting the hypothetical on the second question. So typical.
The reason that Republicans would be against it is because it involves spending money that they’d rather not spend. That’s it.
When Trump originally said that he was in favor of fixing the nation’s infrastructure, my thought was “I can’t stand this guy or his programs, but if he follows through on this, it will be one thing I agree with.”
Fat chance. When it came time to actually suggest a program, several possibilities were nixed by the Republicans, and what they fielded was a 200 billion dollar spending plan that was supposed to combine with corporate buy-ins to magically produce a 1.5 trillion dollar program, using public-private partnerships. How the hell was THAT supposed to work? Most infrastructure is non-sexy fixing up of failing structures that wouldn’t provide any profit. It’s not ultra super-highways with tolls, but boring repairing of potholes and bridges, repaving of public roads, and the like. No corporation was going to pony up funds for infrastructure for no returns.
as for unskilled people working to repair infrastructure, we’ve already been there, and it worked fine. My uncle was with the Civilian conservation Corps, which did great things. The Works Progress Administration and other New Deal programs relied on large numbers of unskilled workers (under skilled directors) to realize fixes in the infrastructure. But it required the US Government to pay for it all, which would mean an increase in taxes. That’s why the Republicans won’t back it, even though it would employ millions of workers (the WPA alone employed about 3 million), fix the infrastructure, and stimulate the economy.
So, you’re cool with the low bidder getting the job.
Construction is a skilled trade, but it doesn’t take that long to learn the basics to be useful.
If work needs to be done in Wyoming, then you either pay tax money to ship and house them, or you pay tax money to a contractor that will hire employees who will need to move to wyoming and pay for housing there.
Most major infrastructure actually needs to be done near where people are, as the infrastructure is needed to support people where they live. Other infrastructure, like a bridge in Wyoming, may find use, but you are not going to get around the problem that there aren’t many people to draw from for a labor force there just by not involving the govt.
That is usually what is said about any government project that one does not see a direct personal benefit from.
While I disagree entirely with your “observation” I have noticed that the right does tend to care more about what is good for them, right here and now, rather than what is good for society.
For instance, there is/was (I haven’t kept up) a big fight in Cincinnati over a bill that had passed city council that required that any plumbing contractors bidding on city contracts have an apprenticeship program. The left said that it was necessary in order to not only provide employment, but also to ensure that in the future there are plumbers to work on city projects. The right said that it would increase costs and lower efficiency.
And yeah, the right is correct that it will increase costs, but they do not care that those costs are what is necessary to continue to have a functional workforce into the future.
As opposed to what? The high bidder? The one with 51+% minority ownership? The one owned by a city councilman’s brother?
Yeah, I’d prefer the taxpayers get the best deal possible. Price is obviously a big part of that, but there ought to be some controls in place to make sure the work is done competently, especially if it’s on something sensitive like bridges or drinking water systems.
There will be enough plumbers in the long term- if there ends up being a shortage, people will move into that field to make that cash because they’re being paid more due to scarcity. And it’ll even out. There’s no need to actively engineer the workforce like that, unless there’s some compelling reason, like not much commercial demand for those skills.
The point I’m trying to make is that the left seems to think that it’s more important to help poor people than to save money, even if that’s at the expense of the larger populace, while the right believes the opposite- it’s more important to prudently spend the tax money, even if it means that poor people aren’t helped out.
I can see both sides of the argument, but in today’s economy, it’s hard to argue that people really need MORE help getting jobs. Unemployment is at a 50 year low, and in some places like Dallas, there are acute labor shortages that are actually putting the brakes on economic growth. There’s a lot of opportunity out there- one article I read said that even fast food places are paying $12/hr
That said, construction is one of the places where the shortage is hitting those industries very hard, so maybe retraining for that might not be a terrible waste of money.
I’d be for a modern CCC like thing for those who aren’t actually working or seeking work and therefore aren’t part of the official unemployment rate. Would they be productive or a big labor, government union, make work constituency though?
Pretty much by definition it’s a “make work” program. But it’s one that fixes up the infrastructure and puts money in the hands of people who need it, and will spend it, stimulating the economy. What’s not to like?
If you think they’re going to be goofing off, well, if it’s run like the 1930’s CCC my uncle was in, there’s not much chance of that.
There’s not much chance it will be run like the 1930’s CCC:
Can you imagine the uproar if we used the military to ship illiterate, unemployed young men from the inner cities to rural areas out west and sent them to live in camps?
It always struck me as a blown opportunity that the Obama administration failed to include a massive infrastructure upgrade in its (otherwise regarded as successful) fiscal stimulus recovery package of 2009.
Something along those lines could still be done now. If it explicitly was focused on less skilled unemployed people with a mandatory work-to-receive government benefits aspect there probably would be considerably opposition from Democrats. If there was a key element of employing skilled tradespeople along with a substantial amount of spending, Republicans would be ticked off at further tightening the labor market (and driving up wages) along with their traditional opposition to government spending in general.
I suppose we need to wait for a major scandal (for instance involving bridge and/or dam collapses) to get something done.
Infrastructure in this country is not crumbling. It is in as good a state as it ever has been. This is a myth constructed by the Civil Engineer lobby who puts out a report that describes infrastructure as crumbling and the solution is to give billions of dollars to civil engineers.
Unemployment is at an all time low, there is no need for this program. The private sector is already providing plenty of actually productive jobs so there is no need for a government make work job.
Infrastructure jobs are not about giving people a shovel and a hard hat. They are complicated jobs that require lots of training. The US government is already providing 1.7 billion a year for job training programthat does not work. Why would a new training program work any better. The government spends 700 billion a year on primary and secondary education. If that is not enough to impart job skills, why should we expect a new program to do it better?
I’ll add to the crowd saying this is a terrible idea. Our infrastructure needs to be repaired but I don’t see why we would pay to train hundreds of thousands of people and move them around the country rather than hiring local companies at each location to do the work that needs to be done and allowing them to staff up as necessary to get the work done. This proposal seems like a way to either spend twice as much money to repair our stuff therefor making it harder to actually fund the project or only get half the work done in twice the time.
Remember that not only will they need to train Joe Blow to run a tape measure but they will also need to train site supervisors and engineers to design this work.
I have to thank HD for actually quoting Bernie Sanders’ proposal, even if nobody seems to have wanted to read it or understand it.
To me it’s obvious that he is calling for a long-term generational program that will deal with the known problems of tomorrow. Talk of handing shovels to unqualified jobless and shipping them across country to contract hadron colliders is rank obfuscating nonsense.
The idea that Big Civil Engineering is making up an infrastructure crisis is on the level with the idiocy that scientists are making up climate change just to get research grants. Talk to anyone in government at any level in any state. They know what they have to deal with.
The truth is that 60% of the population now attend some post-high school educational institution. We’ve created a society in which a college degree is a needed credential for jobs which never needed them and yet at the same time scanted on trade education for the millions of jobs and people that are truly necessary to meet the challenges of climate change, brownfield remediation, power generation and distribution, an aging population in aging housing, and, yes, the roads and bridges and streets beneath our feet.
The proper acronymic parallel is not with the CCC or other emergency programs but with long-term generational education like the A&M. Agricultural and Mechanical schools once proliferated in this country. Texas A&M is probably the only well-known one that kept the name but every state (even DC) has a land-grant college whose purpose was to train people in the practical arts. Even New York has one. It’s called Cornell and it’s part of the Ivy League, but it has a nationally-recognized agriculture school and there are Cornell Co-Operative Extensions in every county that help locals along with experimental stations that develop new and improved foods.
Rather than rail at imaginary targets of your own invention, you might investigate what the government can do - better than the private sector - that has the potential of solving problems we already are facing and will only get far worse over the next generation. I’m sure that’s why the oft-maligned millennials are looking so favorably at politicians who advocate these. The future is the world they’ll be living in, and bringing up families in, and needing jobs for. The challenges are not insurmountable. Some people’s mental walls are, but we can put them to one side and do what’s needed regardless of their opposition.
It seems funny to me that there are many saying “Choosing between this and hiring skilled, inexpensive private companies to fix everything, I’d pick the latter!”, when what’s actually going on is “Choosing between this, and not funding ANYTHING and letting things crumble as they may”.
Not to say that there aren’t other ways to fund an implement widespread infrastructure repair and maintenance, but all of those involve the word “fund”, and so republicans oppose them reflexively.
The federal government spent $4.15 trillion in FY2018. In FY2019 they spent $4.41 trillion. The idea that Republicans are “not funding ANYTHING” is laughable on its face. Just looking at the non-defense discretionary slice of that pie, we spend about 15% of it ($101 billion) on transportation programs.
ETA: source (pdf)
Having worked at the transportation department, I am well aware that government money is spent on infrastructure repair. I am also aware that such efforts are not keeping up.
Really, it was quite obvious that I was speaking spending anything MORE. I mean, clear on the face of it. Nobody could miss it. Certainly the proposed Sanders plan would be in addition to other efforts, not replacing them, so I can’t imagine anybody would fail to understand that that is the subject under discussion.
And republicans, indeed, do not wish to spend more. Well, unless it can be routed to themselves or their cronies anyway.
I wish that statement were true more often than it is.
To your broader point about Republicans resisting “more” spending, I think we can agree that they do it more often than dems, so in our current political climate, they’d be the ones arguing against spending additional funds to implement Bernie’s proposal. I’m curious about your opinion though: if $101 billion for transportation programs is “not keeping up”, how much money do you think it would cost to do an adequate job of “keeping up” with needed infrastructure costs? Are we just $10B short, or do we need to double it? Increase it ten-fold? Something else?