Reply #4: with the financial sector largely stabilized, the biggest drag on the economy is unemployment. [View All]

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this right thing to do is for the government to simply hire workers directly. it's all well and good to think it's better to have longer term, private sector jobs, but what we need now is actually temporary jobs. get people working, get employers competing for workers instead of unemployed people competing for jobs. that will get people spending, which in turn will lead to private businesses needing to hire more. THEN the government can wean people off the temp jobs.

personally, i don't mind the idea of permanent government jobs, but i understand that temp jobs might be an easier sell in washington.

in any event, hiring a ton of people to fix our crumbling infrastructure seems like the right thing to do. a lot of fdr's work programs in the '30s were infrastructure-related.



but of course, no one seems to think that government jobs "count". for some reason, if the government pays $40,000 a year to hire a worker, that doesn't count. but if, instead, the government hands over $50,000 a year to a private company who hires that same worker and skims $10,000 off the top ($100 of which goes back to government officials as campagin contributions), THAT counts as a real job.

whatever.