I believe Sweezy & Magdoff suggested years ago that the WPA was the only government program ever that 'pointed beyond' capitalism -- by shaping the job to fit the worker rather than the worker to fit the job. It scared the White House itself, and it was rapidly being converted to the PWA even before the war shut down both.
And even as a 7 or 8 year old kid at the time, I can remember fragments of the unceasing media attack on it. The man leaning on his shovel instead of using it was a major media character. In fact that (plus the sitdown strikers who didn't take showers but just got stinky) are my only pre-1940 memories of public events. And I lived in a household that worshipped Roosevelt. Carrol On 7/6/2011 11:24 AM, Doug Henwood wrote: > > On Jul 6, 2011, at 11:57 AM, Jim Devine wrote: > >> also, as E. Cary Brown showed, fiscal stimulus was pretty weak during >> this period, being mostly restricted to balanced-budget stimulus. > > Employment in various New Deal programs wasn't trivial - on the order of a > couple of million, as I recall. And WPA spending was around 2% of GDP. Not > enormous, but not nothing. > > Doug > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
