So The Green Party

Seems to be to the right of President Obama!

I was talking with Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential nominee, the other day; she offered a different approach, one that harkens back to President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Back in the Great Depression, FDR was more focused on getting people back to work than on handing out money. He set up the WPA and the CCC to provide employment for out-of-work Americans — jobs building needed infrastructure: bridges, post offices, courthouses and other federal buildings.

The idea was that taxpayers should get something out of helping the unemployed.

The Green Party’s Stein has a similar suggestion, and comments: “If you don’t have work, you’d go to an employmentoffice, not an unemploymentoffice, and you’d get a job, not sit home, depressed, with a check.”

At its peak, the WPA employed over 3 million men and women who would’ve otherwise been jobless.

And the Civilian Conservation Corps put the unemployed to work improving national parks and other pieces of federal land.