What happened to the Obama
”
shovel ready
”
financial rescue plan to get the country back on economic track?
The plan was to overhaul roads, bridges and transit systems, as
well as rescue our national infrastructure.
“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” – Thomas Jefferson
What happened to the Obama “shovel ready” financial rescue plan to get the country back on economic track? The plan was to overhaul roads, bridges and transit systems, as well as rescue our national infrastructure. The package was intended to create up to three million jobs. The bulk of this plan, however, is for construction and repair, the most of which would be done by union laborers.
The unions benefit. What about the rest of the country?
Now, come with me to the past.
Shortly, after I was born in 1930, our country fell on hard times. This was the “Great Depression” and our country was out of work. Then, Franklin D. Roosevelt brought us back from the brink of catastrophe, supposedly. He established a number of work related agencies. The WPA, Works Progress Administration, helped to build the infrastructure of our nation … highways, bridges, etc.
And, the CCC, Civilian Construction Corps, built government and park facilities. As I grew up in Oklahoma, my father worked as a surveyor for the WPA.
Our five-bedroom home sustained my grandmother, my uncle, and my mother, father and me. We always had a spare bedroom for relatives or friends coming off the farm to go to business school.
Fortunately, my bachelor uncle owned our house. He was an entrepreneur, who in the mid-1920s with his friend, established a company which manufactured propane tanks for farmers. In the late 1960s, they retired as millionaires.
However, the “Great Depression” years were sad times. Not only did the stock market crash, but the weather turned against farmers.
Those torrid years started in 1930 and continued through 1936. In 1934, 160 people died from heat-related causes. In the worst year, 1936, the national toll was 5,000. I still remember the heat when growing up.
Devastated were Oklahoma, Kansas and the Dakotas. Wells dried up, trees shed their leaves, lawns turned white and rivers dried up. The Mississippi was so short of water that you could walk from shore to shore. In fact, during the “Depression,” those hardy pioneers who had come out to farm the central plains in the 1880s suffered this horrible blow. This became “The Dust Bowl.”
Steinbeck wrote of these poor farmers, the “Okies,” who traveled to California for a new life in his “Grapes Of Wrath.”
Apparently, however, neither the WPA or CCC brought us out of the “Great Depression.” It was World War II that brought us out of the financial “doldrums.”
With patriotic pride, our country rallied into a manufacturing juggernaut. Almost everybody worked. From out of the home, women began to work in the defense industries.
When World War II ended, our economy started to bloom. Before, we had neighborhood grocery stores and “downtowns” for the rest of our shopping, Remember Kresses, Sears, Penney’s, Woolworth’s and Montgomery Wards, were located downtown.
In the 1950s, entrepreneurs saw a new opportunity. They expanded shopping and grocery buying to “neighborhoods.” No longer was there a vital town center. Neighborhood shopping centers with all those department and grocery stores became vogue. Our economy began to flourish.
Likewise, developers and contractors saw an opportunity and began to build tracts of homes. Veterans were supplied the ability to purchase homes with little down payment. The economy flourished.
As the economy boomed, so did education. The GI Bill helped veterans go to college with monthly stipends for as many months as served in the military.
Entrepreneurs and the educated enhanced our country from the 1950s through the 1980s. It was a time of new shopping centers, babies, houses, cars, fast-food restaurants and television sets.
From the 1960s to the ’90s, my aerospace career kept me employed. Most of my career was spent proposing rocket systems to government agencies.
This was during the “Cold War” with USSR and our space exploration to the moon. Our country invested in those organizations and companies capable of inventing and manufacturing hardware to achieve both purposes. This not only attracted the highly intelligent, but also those who could perform the fabrication. That’s where our national money went. Not a “hand out,” but national purchases for national interests, which helped all of us from the top to the bottom of our financial spectrum, as well as maintain our world prominence.
Now, we get government take-over of banks, automobile manufacturers, so called “cap and trade,” as well as proposed national health care. And, look at all those presidential “czars” for almost everything.
We need a national plan that works, not socialism.
Burton Anderson is a Purple Heart Korean War Marine veteran who has B.A., M.A. degrees, was a junior college instructor and spent 32 years in aerospace industry.
