Nothing else is more important right now. We're talking about survival. This is an in your face reality. Not an abstract war that most people have buried in the back of their mind.

Millions of peoples lives are being torn apart through no fault of their own. They see Wall St. and Washington as the enemy. It was their combined poor management that brought this on. Yet they've propped each other up and have walked away from the mess.

but government will prevent patients from getting any health care that has not been 'proven' to work.

government shall have free reign.

Sick Americans shall only get what government decides.

Jobs for the sake of jobs is the obvious argument you are making. There are still far too many people in this country who have no ability to understand what that means to make it happen. We believe in the God of money, we think it a living thing, and we will sacrifice more virgins, more children, more elderly, more poor people until that God returns its fortune to us.

Ever since the Crash of 08, we have needed the equivalent of the WPA - that saved both of my grandfathers and their families.

I have argued for a direct grant of 10K$ for each new job created (can't be a contractor, can't have worked for the company in the past year, etc). If the employee does not work for the full year, the grant becomes a loan which must be repaid.

16 million jobs for 160 billion$

Look at the failed drug war experiment, the foreign occupation experiments in Iraq and Afghanistan...we can't or won't admit when we've f*cked up and change course.

"Its accomplishments were enormous, yet during its lifetime it was the most excoriated program of the New Deal," writes Nick Taylor in "American-Made," his comprehensive, sometimes impassioned account of the WPA's rise and fall.

"Its workers were mocked as shiftless shovel leaners," he writes. "Its projects gave rise to a mocking new word: 'boondoggles.' Red-baiting congressmen called it a hotbed of Communists." The Chicago Tribune described the WPA as "a vampire political machine." One agitated Republican representative referred to it as an attempt "to sabotage the capitalist system."

Sound familiar?

From a review Nick Taylor's American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA

The damage done by prolonged unemployment is deep and wide.  I haven't lost my job but have definitely seen serious lapses in patience with my children.

What would it be like if my business shut down and I had no income?  Frightening to me.  I cannot imagine the psychological strain ue parents are facing and truthfully I don't want to.  

I think the job creation credit is a bad idea though.  Labor has suffered the most in this downturn and I think the best policy is direct stimulus into public works and education programs on a massive scale.  Building new schools and hiring more teachers, fixing bridges and ailing infrastructures would create new jobs that would lst 3-5 years.  That is essential as the last recession took nearly 4 years to return to peak employment.

Why is it so bold to spend 900bn over 2-3 years when that is our current defense spend annually (including iraq and afghanistan)?

In q4 2009 and q1 2010 GDP is going to be half of what it was in q3 and companies will continue to sag under the strain of worried consumers.  

1.  A month of salary for each year they worked.
   
2.  After that ends, they get a % of their salary from unemployment, full paid healthcare.  

Germans are worried that as the benefits run out, the economy will not be able to re-absorb the workers laid off.  Which I think we should also be really worried.  When the economy grows and productivity is increasing, who is gonna hire people back?

They have rules on what an acceptable job is, for a parent the salary has to be at 67%, no children 60%.  

The benefits run for 12 months.  

CNN has a pretty good slideshow of what it's like for several families trying to survive on UE:

My guess is that 'I don't know, yet' fell on ears unbelieving in Tokyo.

Obama's dithering must have looked especially weak before newly elected Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama, who managed to formulate a policy on Afghanistan Japan is likely to stick about a month ago. Namely: forget re-fueling from Japanese naval vessels.

Evidently the new, new message is 'I'll decide, soon'. How the reality is going to change in the time between now and soon is anybody's guess. I suspect we'll hear some new crap about China now willing to exert influence in Afghanistan or some such CYA nonsense.

Afghanistan, like Japan and Germany, is a fifty-year project, but we're not hearing about the real cost of the enterprise.

This is the telling graph.