I know the Democrats revere FDR, but Biden takes it a little too far this morning. In an interview on CNBC, Biden proposes to solve the financial crisis by expanding government, calling in effect for another Works Projects Adminstration (WPA) — the New Deal agency that tried solving the Great Depression through public works projects (via William Amos):
For a crisis essentially created out of government interference, Biden offers nothing more than a “hair of the dog” solution. He wants bankruptcy laws changed to force lenders to offer lower terms to people with higher risk, which is exactly what created this crisis in the first place. He claims to side with the man in the street against the shareholders, but his solution would create more crises like we face now, not less.
The idea of creating a new WPA is absolutely ludicrous. The first WPA was a failure that only the outbreak of war eclipsed. World War II tranferred money out of government hands to the private sector, which put millions of people to work much more efficiently than the charity-case WPA ever did. Biden would pull capital out of the market in a crisis where it’s needed more than ever, and put it into the hands of government that would waste most of it on bureaucracies and little-needed makework. That capital vacuum would pull down what’s left of the investment structure in the American economy.
Does Biden want to create solid jobs for Americans? Let’s open the OCS and interior shale formations for drilling and refining. That would employ millions of Americans, produce energy, keep American wealth inside the country, and establish energy stability to help drive the economy. That doesn’t require government make-work jobs that burden American taxpayers and will create revenue for federal and state governments.
