Second 'new deal' won't work without ... work

On Labor Day, 7.5 million Americans lost federal unemployment benefits. An additional 3 million unemployed lost the $300 bonus that had been in place since March. That's a lot of people, and it got me to wondering: What would Franklin Roosevelt — who put America to work during the Great Depression — make of the way Washington has responded to the COVID-19 economic crisis?

The New Deal's attack on the Great Depression had four main components: temporary direct relief for the impoverished, in the form of cash grants administered by the states; a stronger social safety net, through new programs such as Social Security; an expanded regulatory state, with new policies and agencies aimed at stabilizing and strengthening the economy; and — most important of all, according to FDR — jobs for the legions of unemployed.

As he said in his inaugural address: "Our greatest primary task is to put people to work."

Just four weeks after that speech, Congress adopted FDR's plan for a program to employ unmarried men aged 18 to 25 to live in camps while working to plant trees, build reservoirs, strengthen flood-control systems, stop soil erosion and improve campgrounds. They were paid $30 a month but received only $5; the rest was sent home to their families.

By August 1933, 300,000 young men and veterans were working for the Civilian Conservation Corps. By winter, more than 4 million more were repairing streets, building dams and constructing schools and other public facilities. New Deal programs would also employ teachers to conduct literacy and vocational classes for the unemployed, artists to paint murals, actors to stage plays, writers to document the nation's culture and folklore, and musicians to write songs. Woody Guthrie wrote "Grand Coulee Dam" while on the federal payroll to promote it.

Since even before President Joe Biden took office, Democrats have been likening him to FDR: a president with a chance to use an economic crisis to redefine the limits of government and transform the country. Nine months into his presidency, that's still a popular line of thinking on the left.

Yet Biden's most significant domestic policy accomplishments concern only the first of the New Deal's four parts: direct relief, in the form of the additional unemployment benefits that began under President Donald Trump, a second stimulus check to most Americans, a 30% increase in average monthly food stamp payments, and a temporary expanded tax credit for families with children.

These are worthy initiatives in the spirit of the New Deal. But what about FDR's top priority, jobs for the unemployed?

The $550 billion in new infrastructure funding passed by the Senate will create construction jobs. But these jobs will largely be for career professionals (and union members), not the general population of unemployed Americans. Over two years, the bill is expected to create about 2.5 million jobs, a far cry from New Deal numbers, when the country's population was two-thirds smaller.

Since the start of the pandemic, Congress has authorized more than $5 trillion in emergency spending, much of it on relief. Some of this went toward keeping existing workers employed. But not a nickel went to hiring the unemployed into temporary job programs.

It's true that Biden's proposal for a Civilian Climate Corps — an echo of Roosevelt's CCC — is included in the Democrats' $3.5 trillion spending plan. Even so, it would create only about 10,000 jobs, a tiny fraction of the army Roosevelt put to work.

The fact is, though we don't often think of it this way, Democrats and Republicans have come to share a core conviction: In a crisis, government's role in addressing unemployment is to offer relief, not work.

Had today's bipartisan adherence to macroeconomic efficiency carried the day in the 1930s, FDR might have scrapped public employment in favor of broader and more generous direct relief.

And the country would be poorer for it.

For all the talk on the right about the Democratic Party's radicalism, it remains far more conservative on economic policy than it was in FDR's day. The Democratic Leadership Council that helped elevate Bill Clinton's brand of centrism may be defunct, but its faith in the private sector to create jobs during a period of high unemployment still holds.

Yet today's progressives stand to the left of Roosevelt in a crucial way: their willingness to provide cash relief without expecting — or empowering — anyone to work.

In his first month in office, FDR made plain his preference — and the public's preference — for work over relief:

He returned to this theme in his annual address to Congress in 1935. He said that "continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. ..."

Today we do not hear Democratic Party leaders speaking of idleness posing a threat to society, or the power of relief to destroy the human spirit — even though labor market participation rates have steadily declined over the past 20 years.

I suspect FDR would be surprised to learn that we have forgotten something he viewed as fundamental to the New Deal, as it is with any "deal": an understanding that each side had obligations to uphold. Government had an obligation to provide help, and able-bodied citizens had an obligation to labor for their checks.

During the pandemic, the compact between citizen and government has been mostly one-sided: Government provides. The $1.9 billion American Rescue Plan that Congress passed in March reflects the Democratic Party's heroic mindset: Save the helpless. But the voters Democrats are trying to pry from the Republican Party don't want Washington to ride to their "rescue." They want to save themselves and their families through the work of their own hands — just as those who took New Deal jobs did.

The difference between a "deal" and a "rescue" is worth contemplating. Democratic leaders and activists are continually frustrated that so many working people vote Republican, and they usually lay the blame on cultural flashpoints, from abortion to immigration. Those certainly play a large role. But as I heard while traveling across the country over the past year, many people are concerned about what they perceive as the country's declining work ethic, and they often lay the blame for that on a Democratic Party that they view as more concerned with providing benefits than promoting work.

Had Biden and congressional leaders opted to offer Americans a deal rather than a rescue, they could have directed much or all of the $611 billion in stimulus checks and unemployment bonuses to creating temporary jobs benefiting the nation in a variety of ways: fighting wildfires in the West; helping communities recover from Hurricane Ida; running summer school sessions for the millions of students most harmed by remote learning; paying artists to enrich communities with public art; and tackling the $12 billion backlog of deferred maintenance projects in our national parks. Spending the money on jobs rather than relief also would have helped private employers fill positions, as more workers returned to the labor market.

It's now common to think that a second New Deal is unrealistic because unemployed Americans are too out of shape or unskilled to do manual labor, a notion that is self-defeating. An American president could, as FDR did, use mass media to inspire participation in jobs programs.

What holds the U.S. back from adopting a large, temporary public employment program has less to do with skills and fitness than with changed attitudes — as well as with the red tape that now routinely delays projects by months and years. The expansion of the regulatory state that accelerated under the New Deal has never stopped, and it has helped undermine any serious reconsideration of the New Deal's focus on temporary work.

That strikes me as an opportunity for Democrats, since it's at least conceivable that some Republicans might support a temporary jobs program that also streamlined federal regulations, especially if legislators were given input into the kinds of jobs that would be funded.