Fool Me Twice (15 page)

From union quarters, not surprisingly, came a similar meme. Speaking in late January 2012 at a Labor Summit sponsored by the Democratic Governors Association, R. Thomas “Tom” Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, “urged a renewed focus” on a 21st Century Works Progress Administration.
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Buffenbarger's promotion of a new WPA carries substantial weight, because he is also a member of the executive council of the AFL-CIO and a member of the Economic Policy Institute's board of directors, serves as chairman of the Labor Advisory Committee to the U.S. Trade Representative, and is a past member of the U.S. Treasury Department's Advisory Committee to the International Monetary Fund. Buffenbarger also once served on the National Advisory Board of the far-left Apollo Alliance and was one of the original 130 founders of the Campaign for America's Future.
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So Buffenbarger has arguably been cheerleader-in-chief for a 21st Century WPA. A lengthy article of his published on the Democratic Socialists of America's labor blog (September 2011) called for the establishment of a 21st Century WPA by the next Labor Day.
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Soon Buffenbarger and Senator Lautenberg were to get big-caliber support in the press.
New York Times
columnist Paul Krugman (a Nobel Prize–winning economist and erstwhile solid Obama partisan, who'd veered sharply off the reservation by April 2011
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) called specifically for a 21st Century WPA:
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On January 3, 2012, Krugman wrote,

So what can be done to accelerate this all-too-slow process of healing? A rational political system would long since have created a 21st-century version of the Works Progress Administration—we'd be putting the unemployed to work doing what needs to be done, repairing and improving our fraying infrastructure.

Despite such big-time boosterism, the WPA projects of the 1930s and early 1940s are, in reality, a cautionary tale for today. The original Works Progress Administration was established in 1935 by President Franklin Roosevelt, via executive order, as a “relief” agency. Congress provided the initial $4.9 billion in funding, a gargantuan sum for nearly eighty years ago. The WPA “offered work to the unemployed on an unprecedented scale by spending money on a wide variety of programs, including highways and building construction, slum clearance, reforestation, and rural rehabilitation.”
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“A noble conception gave rise to the idea that the dangers to morale resulting from the dole”—more gently referenced today as unemployment or welfare benefits—“were to be avoided through work relief, despite its relatively high cost,” authors Lewis Meriam and Laurence F. Schmeckebier wrote in 1939.
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The government took charge of construction projects that would normally have been done by private contractors or municipal governments, had funding been available to them, and local governments benefited from more favorable funding terms than those for “ordinary municipal loans,” they pointed out. Additionally, WPA money was “added to the national debt and not to the local debt and created in the minds of the local taxpayers the idea that they were getting something for nothing.”

In fact, taxpayers and those privately employed appear to have benefitted less than those who worked for the WPA. Meriam and Schmeckebier wrote:

The Works Progress Administration became, as it was intended to be, a safe haven in which the unemployed could weather the storm at wages approximating the prevailing local wage, with enough work to insure a living. The assumption of course was that it would all be temporary…. [Some political and economic forces sought to make the WPA] permanent. It tended in some instances to make the [WPA] worker better off in respect to hours, wages, and perquisites, particularly the surplus commodities he was given, than were persons who were still working for wages. Surplus commodities were purchased in many cases in order to sustain the price which privately employed persons had to pay for commodities given the unemployed and the
[WPA] workers. Thus the tendency was to establish contemporaneously two different economic systems.
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The 21st Century reincarnation of Roosevelt's WPA would operate under the auspices of a Works Progress Administration created within the Department of Labor and headed by the secretary of labor.
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Lautenberg's bill proposes projects similar to those of the earlier era, including residential and commercial building weatherization; residential and commercial water use efficiency improvement; highway, bridge, and rail repair and maintenance; manufacturing projects; school, library, and firehouse construction; soil erosion and pesticide runoff prevention; National Park and trail maintenance; and “other projects that are proposed by the eligible departments and determined appropriate by the Administration.”
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While the new WPA legislation is vague on the matter of how many jobs would be created, Lautenberg's pie-in-the-sky press release claims that funds would be awarded to “economically-beneficial job creation project proposals”; “provide businesses unable to locate a worker with suitable skills with a WPA fellow, who would receive on-the-job training from the business and be paid by the WPA”; and “provide funding to communities to improve public safety by hiring unemployed Americans as firefighters and police officers.” When asked how long it would take for people to get hired for these projects (October 18, 2011), Lautenberg replied, “‘A couple of months, maybe. People can get on the job before projects break ground,' since most would require architects, planning and a variety of other managerial, professional and administrative workers to get started.”
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As the 21st Century WPA boondoggle has not come into being, the estimated time frame is inevitably pushed forward into a hoped-for second Obama administration, to 2013 and beyond.

The 21st Century WPA public works legislation does provide information for how the new programs will be funded, claiming it would be “fully paid for through a surtax on income exceeding $1 million ($2 million for joint filers).” For sheer chutzpah, Lautenberg's bill was dubbed “the most expensive bill of the week” by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation,
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projected to cost $250 billion over the next two years. Lautenberg, for his part, claimed the new WPA program would “reduce the deficit by approximately $133 billion over 10 years.”

A December 1, 2011, article by Lawrence Mishel of the progressive Economic Policy Institute admonished the Obama administration to “stop digging us into an even deeper hole!”
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Mishel was not, however, referencing the president's spending proclivities run amok. Instead Mishel's beef was with the Democrats' proposed expansion of the payroll tax holiday. “Direct spending on infrastructure or even on government hiring people to perform useful public jobs (as was done by the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps) is more effective in raising demand and generating jobs” than any tax relief, he asserted.

Months earlier (January 26, 2011), a companion bill to the 21st Century WPA Act—the 21st Century Civilian Conservation Corps Act—had been introduced, but was immediately referred to the Committee on Education and the Workforce.
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Its sponsor was Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH). Kaptur had introduced the same legislation in November 2010, but it likewise failed to get out of committee.

In its “People's Budget for 2012,” the annual spending blueprint cooked up by the seventy-five-member Congressional Progressive Caucus, the reestablishment of a Civilian Conservation Corps is also invoked. It's part of a proposed overall expenditure of $1.45 trillion (that's “trillion,” with a
t
) for “job creation, education, clean energy and broadband infrastructure, housing, and R&D.” (Note: all charts and projections in the Progressive Caucus report were created by the Economic Policy Institute.)
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The ancestor of this progressive fantasy—the original Civilian Conservation Corps—operated from 1933 to 1942. It was the first, and credited by some as the most popular, of Roosevelt's New Deal programs, also known as Roosevelt's Tree Army. The CCC was “credited with renewing the nation's decimated forests by planting an estimated three billion trees.”
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In those days, eligibility for enrollment in Roosevelt's “peacetime army” was restricted to U.S. citizens. The CCC mandated “sound physical fitness” for those employed because of the hard physical labor involved. Additionally, men had to be “unemployed, unmarried, and between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six, although the rules were eventually relaxed for war veterans.” Enlistment was for six months, “although many reenlisted after their
allotted time was up.” In Representative Kaptur's bill, the only requirements are that jobs would be for unemployed or underemployed U.S. citizens. Hiring preference purportedly would be for unemployed members of the U.S. armed forces or those unemployed who have exhausted their unemployment benefits. Jobs would be in construction, maintenance, and public works programs, which would obviously require significant physical ability.

Beyond a laborer's job, CCC employees could be furnished housing, meals, clothing, medical care and hospitalization, and a cash allowance while they are so employed, as well as transportation to and from places of employment. The Kaptur bill called for an appropriation of $64 billion—that's $16 billion for each fiscal year 2012 through 2015. The 21st Civilian Conservation Corps Act also earned the “most expensive bill of the week” distinction in December 2010 from the National Taxpayers Union Foundation.
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By the time President Obama bypassed Congress and issued a little-noticed memorandum—
A 21st Century Strategy for America's Great Outdoors—
in April 2010, key members of his administration tasked with environmental policy had set in motion a chain of events culminating in what is now the 21st Century Conservation Service Corps (21CSC).
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Funding for the “Great Outdoors” initiative comes from the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which, in turn, gets its money through fees paid to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement by companies drilling offshore for oil and gas. LWCF's budget cap is $900 million.
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A nongovernmental publication about America's parks, the
National Parks Traveler
, wondered in February 2011 how timely was the Great Outdoors initiative in “light of current fiscal and political winds.”
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Veteran journalist Kurt Repanshek reasonably asked: “And while the America's Great Outdoors, or AGO, initiative proposes a Conservation Services Corps to draw youth outdoors, don't groups such as the Student Conservation Association, the Boy and Girl scouts, and Big Brothers and Big Sisters already do that?”

But as Kristen Brengel, director of legislative and governmental affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association, observed, the AGO initiative “seeks to tie together the various land-management agencies on shared concerns.”
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This is one way to describe the agenda in President Obama's 2012 State of the Union speech, in which he said,

The executive branch also needs to change. Too often, it's inefficient, outdated and remote. That's why I've asked this Congress to grant me the authority to consolidate the federal bureaucracy so that our Government is leaner, quicker, and more responsive to the needs of the American people.
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Another way to view this consolidation of America's land-management agencies is that it puts their control squarely under the weighted thumb of the president.

The Obama administration's 2013 budget significantly increases taxes for U.S.-based multinational oil companies as well as domestic producers through “proposed onshore drilling permit processing fees, offshore inspection fees, and fees for not meeting lease development deadlines.”
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The budget was released February 13, 2012, on the heels of Obama's SOTU, in which he spoke of more domestic oil and gas production. But how much of the proposed $10.72 billion increase in taxes over ten years from the oil industry would end up in the Land and Water Conservation Fund—funds which could be used for Obama's conservation projects—is unknown.

The week after Obama's America's Great Outdoors executive fiat, Center for American Progress president and CEO John Podesta took center stage. CAP's new Public Lands Project convened a forum on “Building a Conservation Legacy from the Ground Up,” where Podesta delivered the welcoming remarks. Of two panelists, secretary of the interior Ken Salazar was one.
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Podesta identified the “core strategy” for the AGO initiative: to “target resources to the needs identified by local communities” and to “make it easier for Americans to get jobs working on conservation efforts by lowering obstacles to working with federal agencies.”

Around the same time, in the February/March 2011 time frame, Obama
announced the launch of the 21st Century Service Corps as part of his administration's Youth in the Great Outdoors Initiative.
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The 21CSC programs—aimed at youth between fifteen and twenty-five—are conducted on a year-round or seasonal basis, and range from eight to ten weeks during the summer to full-time employment.
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