Public works schemes

To the Editor;

Apparently Michael Cianchette is not much up on history or he might have noticed that the jobs created in Albuquerque, which he referenced in his Aug. 19 BDN column, seem awfully like the kind of programs launched in the early 1930s by the Roosevelt administration. It was called the Works Projects Administration (WPA), which paid people to clean up roads and make parks.

And those homes built for the homeless in Utah, who paid for them? Some private investors willing to settle for just a nominal rent or was it another socialist scheme with the taxpayers footing the bill?

And who got those street sweeping jobs and low-rent homes? Could it have been immigrants, people who don’t speak English as a first language? But that’s OK, as long as it wasn’t a Democrat coming up with a specific scheme, right?

John F. Battick
Dover-Foxcroft