ABSTRACT
As the economic crisis deepened in late November 2008, President-elect Barack Obama called on Congress to pass immediately a large-scale infrastructure bill with the goal of saving or creating 2.5 million jobs. With this announcement, the media and pundits declared the end of the conservative era and the dawning of a new epoch of government involvement in the economy. In recognition of this change, Time magazine placed on its front cover a picture of President Obama's face superimposed on an iconoclastic image of President Franklin Roosevelt, with the title “The New New Deal.” David Demerjian of Wired argued that a modern-day Works Progress Administration (WPA) was the best way to save the economy and provide good jobs to Main Street. 1
