Infrastructure decay and unemployment are both problems that our politicians have been trying to solve for close to a century. In my research, I noticed an unmistakable similarity between infrastructure expansion and modernization, and economic growth. When an economy grows, there is higher consumer spending and confidence, increasing demands for products. When demand for products increases, the construction of factories to produce those products gains as well, and those factories need workers, thus decreasing unemployment. In order to get to work, those workers need a decent road to drive on, thus employing construction workers to build the roads. The economy has circles like this one in every sector and no job is without connection to another. At this point, we see that improving something as essential and imperative to economic growth as infrastructure will have a profound effect on unemployment and the economy.
Massive infrastructure projects and overhauls like that seen under the Dwight Eisenhower Administration and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration demonstrated that more roads boost the economy more than a lower interest rate or a tax cut. Roosevelt, while dealing with the great depression, a rabid Japan going about conquering Asia, and Nazi Germany enslaving mainland Europe, managed to grow the United States economy by almost 20%. This kind of growth coming out of major depression is incredibly difficult to achieve, and while the war and subsequent booming of the arms industry played a major role in that economic recovery, Roosevelt’s major economic projects in the late 1930’s played a major role in this as well. From 1940 to 1943, the economy boomed at a rate of over 17% and much of that was thanks to a major federal infrastructural overhaul that saw millions of workers put back to work on the government dime. In order to curb the almost 25% unemployment rate brought on by the Great Depression, Roosevelt began a campaign of deficit spending in which he commissioned private infrastructure companies and corporations for billions of dollars in order to employ men to build roads and factories that would whip the United States economy back into place. This worked well and the economy was steered in the right direction. The economic retraction seen during the depression had been fixed and growth exceeded expectations in just three years thanks to new and improved infrastructure projects. After World War 2, America was in much the same position. The economy, without something to expand and fight for, was beginning to retract again. The successor president to FDR, Harry Truman, had been considering mass nationalizations in order to save economic growth, just as Roosevelt had done before the war. He instead chose to commission more in infrastructure and factory building in an effort to spur another era of 17% growth. It was under the following presidency, Dwight D. Eisenhower, that American Infrastructure would see the largest expansion yet.
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The American highway was an idea that Eisenhower had been developing since his command during the liberation of France and the Benelux region during the D-Day operation against the Germans in World War 2. Originally, the highway system was an idea put in place by the Nazi German Government in order to make mass mobilization of workers and soldiers an easier feat. Easy transportation for an unemployed German factory worker from Berlin to the German province of Bavaria would mean a decrease in unemployment in Berlin. The Autobahn, known as the first major German highway, connected Germany and allowed for excess workers to be moved from place to place depending on the demand for work. Eisenhower saw the success of this highway and decided that America needed a major highway system as well, which would become the staple of his presidency. Unemployment was virtually cut in half due to the fact that millions of workers were needed to build these new country-long roads and after their completion, an unemployed worker in North Carolina could drive to Detroit to work in one of Michigan’s factories. Being able to travel for work lowered the unemployment rate significantly and economic growth raised as more cross-country infrastructure was developed. Once the projects were completed, infrastructure spending and maintenance fell dramatically to stave off the growing deficit, which lead to lower and lower quality roads over the decades.
Historical context aside, how does this change modern-day circumstances? With an average of 4% of the working population unemployed at any given time, or about 6 million people, less than 22% of them are eligible or qualified for construction work. This number may seem discouraging, but on the contrary, that is 1.7 million people that the government can put to work at any moment. Wages, working hours per week, transportation, and other problems to come up during the projects can be negotiated through unions to the federal government or vice versa from the federal government to the unions. Once work begins, those employed in this program will be eligible for government-sponsored healthcare and a fair, living wage as construction workers. Eisenhower ran into many problems with his highway dream as well, one of the many and most prominent being land rights. Once work begins, it will take half a decade or more to perform the necessary tasks on a majority of American infrastructure, as well as billions of dollars and millions paid in wages and healthcare. The last problem with this plan is the long-term effects of this infrastructure revamp project. As mentioned before, the government cut spending in order to curb the deficit, and, adjusted for inflation, infrastructure spending is still significantly lower than that of Cold War era America.
To sum up, what has been stated, unemployment and declining infrastructure are both problems that can solve themselves. After the massive cuts in spending post-Eisenhower, our infrastructure declined in quality massively and, though unemployment remained historically low for decades, an average of 4% puts over a million construction workers out of work. The government can commission private companies to build infrastructure, employ as close to those million construction workers as possible, and solve two problems with one solution. If a 3.6% unemployment rate is historic, then a 2.5% unemployment rate after the implementation of this plan will be monumental.
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