Bring Back the WPA

...Across the country thousands of libraries are being shuttered early, or just closed down, for lack of personnel...

...What is usually called the nation’s infrastructure is crumbling from neglect...

...Modern airports made the nation an international giant in the burgeoning airline industry...

...WPA/ Federal Art Project...

...Courtesy of the National Museum of American Art The Driller by Harold Ixhrnan Courtesy of the National Museum of American Art...

...Unfortunately, anguishing over the problem is usually as far as it goes...

...At the minimum, fairwork should help support the most basic of American institutions: the family...

...Invested in public works, this money would go for materials and labor that would directly stimulate badly needed consumer spending, while leaving the rest of us with a rehabilitated infrastructure that in turn would spur more economic growth...

...The CCC, which provided jobs for a halfmillion youths at its peak, is responsible for many of the nation’s forest trails and conservation projects...

...And, while AFDChasan elaborate system of supervision and auditing to ensure that recipients aren’t cheating, meaningful enforcement of unemployment rules is virtually nonexistent...

...Accordingly, there’s nothing wrong with a fairwork program that would substitute federal jobs for certain unemployment benefits...

...the laid-off insurance executive and RI F-ed civil servant would work alongside the furloughed autoworker and unemployed plumber...

...Yet sensible as this principle is, it’s now being flagrantly violated...

...in fact, it wouldn’t really be a gamble at all...

...Eliminating the cut and investing that money in public works would be a far better gamble than “trickle-down” economics...

...Millions of people in this country now willingly perform work that is unpleasant and low-paying...

...That liberals prefer to ignore this has a lot to do with why they’ve been losing elections lately...

...Relief Bluer by 0. Louis Cuglielrni...

...Divisions of responsibility must be established...

...The infrastructure’s needs first must be catalogued and evaluated...

...So far, so good...

...One out of five bridges in America needs major rehabilitation or reconstruction...

...As for those on AFDC, they could choose to work on construction projects, or, more likely, in a variety of other public service jobs such as library work or caring for the elderly...

...Walk just a few blocks in a major American city and you’ll probably find enough litter to fill a large trash can...

...And the occasional horror story notwithstanding, few government efforts in American history have resulted in such substantial and long-lasting benefits...

...U program to rebuild the infrastructure...

...short shrift despite its obvious benefits...

...But they are right about nne thing: No U one with the ability and the circumstances to work should automatically be entitled to perpetual checks from the government in return for staying home...

...This figure doesn’t account for the millions of new jobs generated in the private sector to supply the raw materials and finished products necessary for these projects...

...Under the approving gaze of none other than President Reagan and the New Right, many states are requiring AFDC mothers with three- and fouryearolds to leave them with babysitters or at day care centers if work is available...

...Along with fairwork, the government should institute a uniform audit system for both AFDC and unemployment that will randomly examine enough recipients to make all beneficiaries fearful of cheating...

...1 come here to relax,” admits another...

...Providing that care could keep 200,000 people busy-and could actually save the government money by eliminating the need for hospital or nursing home care...

...Progress of American Industry by Charles Davis...

...Roughly 10,000 people are employed there in the Public Works Program, a compulsory work project tied to the state’s general assistance program...

...According to Pat Choate and Susan Walter, authors of America in Ruins: Be-yond the Public Works Pork Barrel, the interstate highway system is deteriorating so fast that 2,000 miles of road require reconstruction every year...

...Fairwork Two major groups of unemployed Americans can would benefit from a federally sponsored usually receive no unemployment or welfare benefits, though they often have families to support...

...Go to just about any small townin Americaand you likely will find some tangible evidence of the New Deal’s legacy, whether it’s a post office, a courthouse, a city hall, a park, or a school...

...That’s not to say fairwork would be easy to administer...

...Ask a trash collector why he bothers with a job a sociologist might label “demeaning” and he may consider dumping you head-first into a trash bin...

...The Interior Department reports that 63 million acres of public land suffer from soil erosion...

...Unfortunately, liberals are prone to similar fits of logical vacuity when it comes to workfare...

...When it comes to today’s unemployed, these lessons seem lost on the president...

...While fairwork certainly wouldn’t give every unemployed construction worker $ I5 an hour, it would give him a jobsomething hundreds of thousands of those workers don’t have right now...

...Conservatives may be stingy when it comes to giving the truly needy adequate benefits and in opposing government-sponsored job programs...

...for millions, ” fairwork” would provide more than a temporary job...

...Many have held up better than buildings constructed in the 1950s and 60s...

...Powerful institutions also must be convinced of the merits of fairwork...

...by Timothy Noah Laws, we know, are made to be broken, but sometimes they are broken on such a scale that you almost forget they exist at all...

...Suggest a far more ambitious program, run by the federal government and directed at more than just welfare recipients, and conservatives will launch into a spirited attack on FDR, the WPA, and the Socialist (or Fascist, take your pick) New Deal...

...Other jobs would directly benefit the old, the young, and the sick...

...Under such a program, those who’ve exhausted their regular unemployment benefits, whether they’re factory workers or office managers, would be eligible for a variety of jobs, from filling potholes to pouring concrete for bridges to cleaning up city parks...

...Once her children reached the age of six, the woman would have a choice: either accept a job or lose her AFDC benefits, unless she could prove she should be exempted due to her health or other legitimate reasons...

...The dams in the Tennessee Valley and the Pacific Northwest, by providing work for thousands and electricity for millions, brought prosperity that has paid for the original investment many times over...

...Then there’s the bridge down the road you drive over on your way to work each day-it’s so badly rusted highway engineers have decided to close it...

...To compete in today’s increasingly competitive international economy, the nation can’t afford nor to rebuild its infrastructure...

...This view, ‘more compassionate than Gilder’s, is amply supported by evidence...

...It’s the only job I’ve ever had,” says one, “where whether you do your job very well or poorly doesn’t matter...

...Noah and Dan Weil...

...And right now, at least ten million people could use them...

...As for the infrastructure itself, consider one specific project: repairing the interstate highway system...

...America has bean living off the New Deal’s foresight for a half century...

...for example, state and local governments should be required to continue investing some of their own money in public works so the federal government doesn’t end up footing the entire bill...

...U Everyone has a favorite story about a New Deal boondoggle...

...Fairwork needn’t bust the budget...

...One of the WPR’s biggest bockers is Ronald Reagan...

...If Gilder’s welfare is adultery, his workfare must be like group sex...

...In that sense unemployment insurance is like social security, which awards money in equal measure to the impoverished widow and the elderly millionaire...

...is now a beautiful park-like place built by WPA...

...That $2 figure holds one of the more encouraging lessons of the New Deal: we don’t need a bloated bureaucracy to put America back to work...

...Chances are good they’re strewn with litter and tilled with potholes...

...Cutting defense and eliminating some tax cuts and COMs will pay for it...

...The unions are partly right-fairwork would lower the labor costs to government of repairing its facilities...

...Dan Weil and Brian Rosmaia provided research assistance...

...So what’s unfair about giving them that work instead of a welfare check...

...In their place the government would offer a fairwork job to those who had exhausted their regular benefits...

...the congressional proposal for another 13 weeks would be dropped as well...

...The walls in the subway you take downtown are caving in...

...But enforcement of this law hasn’t satisfied District Council 37 ofthe Association of Federal, State and Municipal Employees, which has filed suit to abolish PWP-an action taken after the union failed to organize these workers...

...This drum roll should sound familiar...

...The American Forestry Association estimates that more than ten million acres of national forest need replanting or rehabilitation...

...instead, we think of these payments as insurance benefits...

...Assuming the same proportion of low-skilled workers-and many projects could take a substantially higher proportion-at least four million workers could be employed initially, and far more as people mastered various skills...

...New York state law prohibits PWP participants from performing “any work ordinarily and actually performed by regular employees of any department or any other unit of a county, city, or town...

...Because the state forbids it...

...The reason is depressingly simple: the concept offends ideological taboos on both the right and the left...

...The mess, you’ll recall, was the Great Depression...

...In a sense, America has been living off the New Deal’s foresight for the last half centuryand the time is long past due to recognize it...

...Yes, we are...

...Most thoughtful critics, Republican and Democrat, realize at least $20 billion could be pared from Reagan’s defense budget without jeopardizing national security...

...Before, women with children under six could chooseto U stay at home without jeopardizing their AFDC grant...

...The Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs estimated in 1978 that two millionelderly, mentally ill, and physically handicapped were in need of home assistance...

...Putting that money into rebuilding the infrastructure would be a much better tonic for our ailing economy than giving it to a relatively small number of defense contractors to build weapons that are unnecessary, often defective, and ultimately destined for the scrap heap...

...The 75,000 figure seems small next to the ten million Americans now out of work...

...Conference of Mayors estimates is needed over the next ten years to rebuild the nation’s deteriorated roads, bridges, subways, ports, and water systems...

...With the “Keep America Beautiful” campaign of the sixties now only a memory, our roadsides and city streets look worse than those in most other industrialized nations...

...It’s useful to think of public works as “trickle-up”economics, a more direct way of reviving our economy while helping those most in need...

...after all, if a company’s potential customers didn’t have money to buy their products to begin with, a strategy of cutting taxes was senseless...

...A workfare program in New York City provides anotherobject lessonin whattoavoid...

...As long as the latter periodically drops in at the nearest unemployment office-the Virgin Islands will do-it doesn’t matter how much he’s got in his bank account...

...Finding even more money won’t be difficult...

...Bear with a few of these statistics for a moment...

...For all the similar stories about WPA waste, one easily could get the impression that half of WPA’s funds went to putting Orson Welles’s New York theater project on the dole or to paying able-bodied men to lean on shovels all day...

...Most of the jobless would benefit from substantially increased earnings, not to mention the psychological boost of keeping busy and learning marketable skills...

...on the other hand we have potholes, wobbly bridges, and collapsing subway tunnels galore...

...Fairwork, which revives the now-forgotten promise of Humphrey-Hawkins, is a far better answer...

...Sidney Howe, executive director of the Human Environment Centerand a leading proponent of a bill to revive the Civilian Conservation Corps, estimates the nation easily could employ a half-million people in remedying this neglect...

...But there’s no reason fairwork can’t help both the public and the unions...

...By the time the long-debated bill actually passed, it had been watered down substantially...

...Take the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act, the memorial to the late Minnesota senator that was signed into law by Jimmy Carter in 1978...

...Forcing me to do something 1 don’t want to do, that’s slavery,” complained one Ohio workfare participant on a recent “MacNeil-Lehrer Report...

...the real question is whether the nation prefers a profligate military, overpaid civil servants, and the encouragement of wasteful investment as an alternative to giving idle Americans something important to do...

...What is distressing is that Reagan is hardly alone in these views...

...Unemployed, Detroit, Michigan, 1932...

...People don’t want to be on welfare, they want to work...

...Of the ten million now officially labeled as unemployed, each month 350,000 exhaust their regular unemployment benefits, which last 26 weeks in most states...

...Yet times were even tougher during the Depression...

...Even George Washington understood that...

...Yes, he did-but that program involved only a few welfare recipients, most of whom found jobs in the private sector or performed make-work tasks for the state bureaucracy...

...There’s no small amount of hypocrisy involved here: the same conservatives who oppose abortion and extol the virtues of family life are now denying the care of their own mothers to young children, who are poor to begin with...

...That doesn’t include the 1.5 million Americans the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls “discouraged workers”-those who want to work but who’ve given up trying, usually after months of fruitless interviews and forays through the want ads...

...A humane fairwork program would allow a woman with children under six to remain on AFDC and would raise her benefits to make them commensurate with those received by fairwork pdrticipants...

...Of course, a truly equitable unemployment compensation program would treat the laid-off workers the same as abandoned mothers with identical family obligations...

...After all, didn’t Ronald Reagan himself often boast that his workfare program in California removed people from the welfare rolls...

...Many would choose to work only long enough to tide them over until the economy revives and they could return to their regular jobs...

...Not only will such a program rebuild the infrastructure on which the economy depends, but it will guarantee the immediate creation of millions ofjobs...

...Some might say that times are tough, that interest rates are high and money is difficult to find...

...while requiring all able-bodied recipients to work...

...Some of these jobs require almost no training, and many, such as operating a jackhammer, can be learned in a matter of weeks...

...The roads, bridges, subways, ports, airports, dams, and water systems built during the Depression were a major cause of the nation’s post-World War I I boom-the greatest period of sustained economic growth in American history...

...The official number of people without work, ten million, is almost the same as it was during the Great Depression...

...That’s not to mention the other objects of national neglect that aren’t made of concrete, steel, or asphalt...

...As for the public, the economic benefits of a rehabilitated infrastructure would ripple throughout the economy...

...Compare that to the more than $ I trillion the U.S...

...Indeed, for most able-bodied people, it’s the stigma of dependency that drives them into the workplace...

...And if only half the nation’s 35,000 state, county, and municipal parks added five people to their payrolls to perform badly needed maintenance work, 100,000jobs would becreated,according to the Department of Labor...

...Today a double standard exists: The mostly male recipients of unemployment receive relatively generous benefits compared to women on AFDC...

...But for millions, particularly the “discouraged workers,” fair work would provide more than a job...

...What the skeptics overlook is that for all the understandable haste in getting the Depressionera programs into operation, the government proved remarkably efficient...

...There’s Plenty of Work To Do Rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure isn’t a matter of putting 85,000 adults back to work for six months, as a Democratic proposal now before Congress contemplates...

...The words “coercion” and “slavery” have a way of slipping into these discussions...

...Timothy Noah is a staff writer for The New Republic...

...Aren’t we forgetting something...

...But hundreds of billions of additional dollars still will be required, divided about equally between materials and wages That last estimate may stop you cold, particularly if you’re justifiably concerned that the prospect of large federal budget deficits for years to come will destroy the incentive for long-term investment in our economy...

...Why should a child be penalized if his or her parent wasn’t in the workforce when calamity struck...

...Scoffing at those critics who considered WPA “make work,” Reagan said, “1 can take you to our town and show you things, like a river front that was once swamp...

...But the best argument for fairwork is the example of the working poor...

...But the 13 weeks of extended benefits now available in most states would be abolished...

...Your children’s school is a fire hazard...

...Fairwork needn’t bust the budget...

...Then there are the 1.5 million discouraged workers, whose ranks have grown 50percent in just the last year...

...For a case study of how the infrastructure deteriorates so badly, see Lyle Crowley and Jacob Weisberg, “The Road to Ruin,” page 48...

...The equipment in the factory where you work is half a century old, and the box cars that haul its products away can’t move faster than 20 miles an hour Because the tracks are so decrepit...

...All participants would receive health insurance and the minimum wage (now $3.35 an hour) and would be subject to the same proviso: Those eligible for fair work who choose not to participate cannot receive regular unemployment or welfare benefits...

...Mostly male, these workers R stroightforwcird trode: o job for on RF DC or unemployment check...

...One of the largest items in the first budget of the United States was something then called “internal improvements...

...Kenneth Ziems of the FHA, who administers a federal training program for unskilled roadside construction workers, estimates that 30 percent of these workers-or about 75,000-can master their skills in six months or less...

...At its peak, the WPA had three million people on its payroll, and by the end of its first year had built over 6,000 schools, 5,000 other public buildings, 7,000 water and sewer systems, and 130,000 rural roads...

...Eliminating these increases and putting the nearly $10 billion saved into fairwork would pay the I I I I U wages of almost 1.5 million people...

...It was built by the WPA, not for Jimmy Stewart’s sleepy little home town of Bedford Falls, but for Beverly Hills High School, which, thanks toan impressive tax base made possible by movies such as It’s a Wonderful Life, managed very well during the Depression...

...Yet dare suggest that the samegovernment that provides the job should be able to require recipients to take it, and most liberals act as if you’ve urged the repeal of the Thirteenth Amendment...

...And not only would the government hire many of the unions’ unemployed members, but it would need to continue contracting out a portion of its business in those areas that require skilled workers...

...If we’re interested in the long-term health of the economy, money spent rebuilding the infrastructure is the best investment we can make...

...What little protest has been raised hascome primarily from liberals, who are finally discovering a healthy skepticism about the virtues of day care, particularly when it’s offered at cut-rate prices...

...Likewise, Reagan’s tax cuts, as well as the enthusiasm in certain Democratic circles for government-sponsored research and development efforts to promote high technology, will take years to pay off, if they pay off at all...

...The remainder of thejobs could be filled by laid-off construction workers and fairwork participants who choose to remain ‘in the program long enough to learn more complicated tasks, such as operating bulldozersandgraders...

...The first consists of some of the 11 million people-two-thirds of them children-who now rely on Aid to Families with Dependent Children(AFDC), the nation’s primary welfare program...

...Courtesy of Seaview Hospital...

...After all, people of just about every persuasion, from the delegates to last June’s Democratic party mini-convention to self-proclaimed Tory George Will, have called attention to what the August 2 News week cover story called “The Decaying of America...

...The second major labor pool consists of the nation’s jobless...

...For more on what fair work participants would do, see sidebar on page 45...

...In theory, no conservative worth his Adam Smith necktie would be against fairwork...

...There would be no favoritism...

...We’re not in the habit of thinking of unemployment compensation as welfare...

...But there’s a more compelling argument for making a substantial investm’ent in fairwork...

...Mine involves a gymnasium whose retractable floor revealed a swimming pool below, a contraption featured in Frank Capra’s film, It’s A Wonderful Life...

...A second major source ofpubliccapital is the ten-percent income tax cut scheduled to take effect in 1983...

...According to the Federal Highway Administration, necessary maintenance and repair work on the 42,500-mile system will require more than 250,000 people a year for the next decade...

...In Michigan, the age limit for children was recently lowered to a mere six months...

...One third of all welfare families leave the AFDC rolls each year, for example...

...Every day, tons of the nation’s most valuable topsoil are washed away, the lessons of the Depression-era Dust Bowl forgotten...

...So why is such a program-usually dubbed “workfare”-getting such...

...Start with the streets in your own city...

...This law was passed to assuage fears of unionized employees that the government might do something logicallike try to reduce expenses by replacing some civil servants with welfare recipients...

...and retirees-civilian and militarywon’t put the unemployed back to work...

...Some of them insist on doing so even though they could receive more money on welfare...

...Broken glass has replaced grass in many of the 35,000 municipal parks...

...rather than usingthatasanexcuse, the nation used it as an opportunity...

...Giving cost-of-living raises to federal employees...

...Repairing the infrastructure is exactly the kind of productive investment supply-side enthusiasts have long extolled, but is now being passed up as the wealthy turn to money market funds, Treasury notes, antique jewelry, and a host of other speculative ventures that do little for our economic future...

...That era’s leaders knew the hopes of the jobless didn’t lie in granting large tax breaks to privateindustry...

...Then there’s the urban environment...

...But fairwork shouldn’t stop with the infrastructure...

...No kidding...

...And that doesn’t mean inventing these jobs just realizing where they are...

...And though we insist ours is a compassionate society, millions of elderly, mentally ill, and physically handicapped spend their days alone and uncared for...

...Huge tax cuts and a balanced budget, which helped precipitate the last Great Depression, will somehow prevent the next one, Reagan insists, while a WPA-style public works program would be riddled with waste, fraud, and inefficiency...

...For sheer mean-spiritedness, it’s hard to beat George Gilder, the preeminent guru of Reaganomics...

...Courtesy of University of Illinois Press & Franklin D. Roosevelt Library...

...The beauty of the fairwork program is that there would be no need to create “make-work” jobs...

...It’s clear the size of a fairwork program wouldn’t be limited by the amount of meaningful work to be done, but by the imagination...

...Unions would benefit from the additionalemployment fairwork would generate in the private sector...

...It would train them in skills such as operation of heavy machinery, welding, or construction work-skills helpful later in finding work in the private sector...

...Workers would continue to receive 26 weeks of “regular unemployment...

...Instead, it’s an effort that can employ millions of people, full time, for a decade or more, in work that teaches them valuable skills while building the foundation for our future prosperity...

...All government benefit programs have eligibility requirements, and in many respects a work requirement backed by a meaningful job is fairer than most...

...Unless the federal government is prepared to give up the idea of interstate commerce altogether, it must take the lead in making sure this basic structural work gets done...

...But its major provision was clear: By January 1983 the president was to reduce unemployment in the United States to four percent...

...That’s because there’s an element of pride in any job...

...The same reasoning applies to the unemployed, although most people have grown .accustomed to pretending it shouldn’t...

...D etail...

...The nation has also neglected many of its natural assets: its forests, range land, and topsoil, for example...

...On the one hand we have millions collecting government benefits who’d rather be working...

...The country’s 750 largest cities will require $100 billion in the next two decades to maintain their water systems...

...The important lesson here is that government benefits such as social security and unemployment compensation should not be thought of as inalienable-and inexhaustible-rights...

...Why aren’t these people allowed to do something useful...

...Sufficiently intimidated, the city is making sure to keep PWP workers away from any work that might be construed as useful...

...The WPA also gave Dixon an airport, not to mention work for Reagan’s father...

...Labor unions will fear that their members will lose work or be pressured to make substantial wage concessions if the government can use unemployed workers on its construction projects...

...Only a few seem to realize that America’s oversupply of unemployed labor and the crying demand for investment in our nation’s infrastructure are problems that are made for each other...

...even many Democrats believe that the federal government would bungle any large-scale public works program...

...One ofthe WPA’s biggestenthusiastsis none other than Ronald Reagan, who gushed to an interviewer last December about how much the WPA had done for his home town of Dixon, Illinois...

...Photo by Antonio Suarer...

...The cut, the last installment of the Kemp-Roth bill, will deprive the Treasury of $30 billion a year...

...There’s just no pleasing some people, although it’s useful to remember that this comes from the same writer who once observed that poor men are being “cuckolded by the compassionate state...

...In his best-selling Wealth and Poverly, Gilder confessed that he didn’t even like Reagan’s California experiment because it was based on “the same illusion that was earlier found in the argument for a guaranteed national income: the mirage,of a good welfare system, the idea that one can create a ‘rational’ and ‘compassionate’ program that raises truly needy recipients above the poverty line...

...And while a woman might be forced to rely on AFDC on and off for most of her life, the average length of time she doesn’t work is less than two years...

...Featherfare Having detailed the basic principles, let’s look at how fairwork shouldn’t work...

...But if you think hard about national priorities, a large-scale public works program is not just affordable, it’s absolutely necessary...

...It’s a tenet ofliberal faith that the nation’s unemployed and welfare-dependent will jump at the chance of having a decent and meaningful job...

...So more than enough money is available...

...Rather than receive benefits, participants are “employed” through PW P, nearly all in civil servant jobs...

...It’s a straightforward trade: a meaningful, financially rewarding job in exchange for an AFDC grant or an unemployment check...

...Hey, Hey, Hey for the WPA If this scheme sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because something very much like it was tried once before, when the country was in a similar mess...

...Yet less than one percent of WPA projects had anything to do with the arts...

...But rehabilitating the interstate system would cost only $20 billion over the next decade...

...But participants complain that they are doing superfluous work...

...In Mississippi a family of three receives just $96 in cash and $1 83 in food stamps each month...

...The WPA spent $6 1 per worker each month, $46 of which went to wages and only $2 to administrative expenses (most of the balance purchased materials...

...Thanks to Ronald Reagan and Paul Volcker, unemployment now hovers at about 9.5 percent...

...Well, with barely four months to go don’t hold your breath...

...Unable to find jobs, the single women who head these families must try to subsist on benefits that are often shockingly inadequate...

...But put aside for a moment all these people the Human capital that we might call the supply side of our sagging economy-and look at the demand side...

...Congress could also repeal all or part of the ten-percent tax cut that took effect this July, redirecting up to $30 billion more into public works...

...For lack of a better word, let’s call the marriage of job creation and infrastructure repair “fair work...

...In New York City, for example, there are 1,600 fewer sanitation workers than there were 28 years ago...

...Give a full-time job to a welfare mother who can work and her family would be better off than it is now in all but a handful of states...

...Recipients could continue to work as long as they wished...

...The solution then was a smorgasbord of public works programs: the Civil Works Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Public Works Administration, and the Works Projects Administration, to name just the most prominent...

...A paper issued by the National Urban League treads a bit more lightly, arguing that “workfare would actually lead to more self-disdain through the creation of the ‘welfare job’-the modern-day equivalent to the workhouse...

...Even in a fairly affluent state like Maryland, the total benefits equal $414 a month, or only 70 percent of the official poverty level...

...I go home to work...

...If this proposal to provide jobs for the unemployed, reform welfare, and rebuild the infrastructure is to get off the ground, the price will be high...

...The dam at the city’s reservoir is webbed with huge-and growing-cracks...

...Little wonder...

...Why should a child be penalized if his or her single parent wasn’t in the work force when economic calamity struck...

...Likewise, the unemployed auto worker who’s the father of five is entitled to the same check as an unmarried young man who arranges to be laid off so he can go sailing...

...Of course, some of the money already is being spent-in welfare grants and unemployment compensation, for example...