Bring Back the WPA  The 50th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson's
"War on Poverty" has prompted a bout of national soul-searching
about how much progress we've really made. If we're actually
interested in helping the poor, we should look even farther back
in history, and resurrect the WPA.  The Works Progress
Administration started in 1935 and ran all the way until the
WWII jobs boom rendered it unnecessary. It was essentially a
huge national jobs program. It covered the entire nation. It
focused on public works projects, but also put tons of needy
artists and writers on the public payroll. It was meant
primarily to relieve unemployment (and it did), but the legacy
of the artwork and writing and countless construction projects
that were completed under its auspices lives on today.  A great
time to resurrect such a national jobs program would have been
in 2009, in the very depths of The Great Recession. Instead, the
government chose to pour most of its money directly into the
banking system. Five years later, Wall