Flaylo
Handsome Devil
Richard (RJ) Eskow: Invisible Americans: The Overlooked Millions Inside Those Job Numbers
People in Washington over-complicate the debate by tinkering at the margins: tax-break this, incentive that. Those things will have some effect, but there's a simpler and better way to fix the joblessness problem: put people to work. At a time when this country needs trillions of dollar in infrastructure repair, government should hire people and get on with it.
George W. Bush had no problem doing that a few years ago. He signed a bill spending more than a quarter of a trillion dollars on infrastructure spending while the Republican Speaker of the House bragged about creating. But Republicans would apparently rather prolong the suffering so that they can defeat Obama and the Democrats in 2012.
As for the Obama Democrats, either they don't understand the problem or they don't think it's politically smart to propose fixing it. I suspect it's the latter -- and they're dead wrong. The president's jobs bill had some useful ideas. But the president went small on the fixes and, in his typical fashion, couldn't resist pushing useless conservative "job creation" ideas along with the good ones.