Years from now, when the US economy is in much better shape, in all likelihood the savior will be recognized as "helicopter money."
In fact, this solution is so glaringly obvious that both presidential candidates are unabashedly arguing for it - even if they're sticking to the conventional terminology of "fixing roads and bridges" and "well-paying jobs."
There's actually nothing new about helicopter money - not just the concept itself, but even its practice. It just hasn't had a particularly good record: more often than not, wholesale printing of massive quantities of fiat paper currency has led to runaway inflation, so it's quite natural that the very thought of stashes of $100 bills falling from the sky conjures up other, scarier images, i.e. of women in early-1920s Weimar Germany carting wheelbarrows full of deutschemark notes to buy their groceries.
But the global economy has changed, thanks to China: to keep the economy humming there, the authorities are quite literally "raining helicopter money" yet again on the property and infrastructure sectors, much like they did in 2009. Many instinctively argue that this is merely delaying the day of reckoning for the country's already unsustainable debt bubble, but that analysis largely depends on the assumption that the advanced economies, particularly the US, won't follow suit.
America's experience with quasi-helicopter money has actually had big bright spots. We basically spent our way out of the long-term industrial recession of the 1930s by churning out tens of thousands of guns, tanks, trucks, planes, ships, etc. to beat the Axis powers during World War II. It was this drastically elevated level of manufacturing capacity that also powered the postwar economic boom whose foundation was a vastly expanded infrastructure (i.e. the interstate system) and cheap housing (i.e. Levittown and Trump Sr.'s development projects).
The reason this earlier bout of federal spending-led economic revival can't be considered genuine helicopter money is that we were still tied to the gold standard: the Bretton Woods accord of 1944 pegged the US dollar to the yellow metal at $35 per ounce, which was rather easy at the time because America enjoyed a huge surplus of gold holdings from its overseas allies which wanted the safety of an ocean barrier for their precious bullion. But even with this peg, in fact the Fed and the Treasury throughout the 1950s were already debasing the greenback to stimulate growth and investment: both foreign and domestic appetite for US debt easily outstripped the gold supply, with the result that well before the notorious fiscal strain of LBJ's social welfare crusade and military intervention in southeast Asia in the mid-1960s, we were already borrowing our way to prosperity.
That early postwar history (1945-1970) - the tender and formative years for Trump, Clinton, and their fellow early baby boomers - is the era that both parties now look fondly to as one of a rather successful government-sponsored economic development effort, despite its obvious flaws (i.e. racial discrimination) and near-total reliance on private corporations for the actual work that was done. It was a period of rising productivity and wages for ordinary assembly-line hands, owing in no small part to the far greater political clout of labor unions than in the last few decades.
Of course, those days can never be brought back, let alone improved on - or can they?
Significantly, orthodox finance and economics' opposition to the notion of helicopter money has eased of late, and this has been reflected in the fact that the opposing party platforms have essentially converged on the idea, with a common acceptance now of its philosophical essence, even if they continue to differ on the specifics of policy implementation.
The fact is, it's already been raining helicopter money on Wall Street for years - it was just a matter of time before even Wall Street would open up to redirecting some of those showers to Main Street.
Even taking into account the American Society of Civil Engineers' interest in promoting as much civil engineering work as possible in this country, their widely publicized infrastructure report card leaves an unmistakable impression of the urgency of broad infrastructure upgrades across virtually all 50 states. So yes, that's potentially lots and lots of jobs.
It's arguable, though, just how well-paying they'll be - and in fact how much of a real boost to overall economic growth such a major round of neo-Keynesian pump-priming will actually achieve in today's national and global environment.
State by state, the results can be expected to vary considerably. Some states are already doing far better than everyone else at funding the upkeep of their own road networks and bridges. But these tend to be the very exceptions that call into question the necessity of deep federal involvement and initiative in juicing the economy to begin with - and they're proud of it.
Realistically, although helicopter money from Congress will be a great shot in the arm to the most cash-strapped states that can least afford to renovate their tottering public utilities, such aid must be tied to structural reforms, especially non-financial sector deregulation, at the state level. Red tape hasn't merely inflated the cost of business in all too many states, but it's also sucked untold millions of dollars into the dead-end pockets of bureaucrats - far from those of firms and consumers from whence they'll circulate back into the real economy far more efficiently. By the same token, the federal government itself had better trim down its own leviathan of rules and taxes that stifle the vitality of the real economoy, even as it ramps up and improves much-needed oversight of the big banks and the financial sector generally.
There's the rub. The economy clearly needs an injection of cash into real economic activity, as opposed to the past eight years of propping up asset values to promote so-called "wealth effects" for investors. Yet just as free-market conservatives must drop their deep ideological aversion to any form of public stimulus, so must redistributionist liberals concede to the superior ability of small businesses and ordinary individuals to deploy such stimulus on their own behalf. For too long, a corrupted brew of big government and big business has colluded to squeeze Joe Sixpack and Mom & Pop Shop; for this powerful alliance - borne of the Progressive movement of a century ago - to redeem itself, it must now collaborate as intently to return to the American people what's rightfully theirs as it has already done to usurp it in the first place.
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