Andrew Leonard: Why can't Obama be more like Roosevelt?
In the wake of 10.2 percent unemployment, the usual suspects are calling for more stimulus and even dreaming of a new Works Progress Administration. The subtext: Why can't Obama be more like Roosevelt? People are out of work, so instead of subsidizing car purchases or home ownership, why not just hire them to build the kinds of parks and schools and bridges that made Roosevelt's WPA such a lasting influence on the American landscape?
The politics of then and now are quite different, of course. Roosevelt faced nothing remotely like the intransigence currently being demonstrated by the opposition party. But could there be other constraints? While defending Obama from critics who are directly blaming the president for the current unemployment numbers, Megan McArdle makes an interesting point:
Stimulus is at best an incredibly blunt instrument. And it is made blunter by all of the procedural checks we've accumulated over decades of government growth, not to mention very powerful public sector unions. FDR could tell his government to go out and hire people to paint hallways or build dams. The current president needs Environmental Impact Statements, public review periods, and the okay of AFSCME.
McArdle is onto something. Consider the city of Berkeley, which is dotted with amazing relics of the New Deal, for instance, the lovely Codornices Rose Garden, an amphitheater of roses carved into the Berkeley hills by WPA workers. If a similar project was conceived today, it is impossible to imagine its progress occurring at anything even approaching a snail's pace. In addition to a no doubt hotly-contested Environmental Impact Statement, there would be massive NIMBY-ism from the local hill-dwellers, protests against the displacement of indigenous plants and animals from a motley crew of activists, and endless City Council meetings debating the merits of every aspect of the new project until the wee hours. Just getting new bike lanes in San Francisco has required a titanic -- and highly litigated -- struggle over the last half-decade. To pull off something on the scale of the WPA, which hired millions of workers to build thousands of schools and bridges and parks all over the country, would require battling "procedural checks" of gargantuan proportions...