and I doubt that they will be able to do so for quite some time. I guess we are stuck with long-term staggering unemployment because Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats are too scared to act boldly.

I read somewhere where Mr. Summers was not in favor of extending unemployment compensation.

RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.

claiming to create jobs Bloomberg:

My economic team is looking at ideas such as additional investments in our aging roads and bridges, incentives to encourage families and business to make buildings more energy efficient,” additional tax cuts, and more steps to ease the flow of credit to small business and promote exports

Just ridiculous! They need a WPA or a CCC and to create a federal VC fund for small business, not more "oh ease credit" and oh, put energy efficient light bulbs and insulation in your home!

We don't need "investments" we need jobs for roads and bridges, direct employment, direct jobs.

Not a mention of dams and levies, many of which are in red hot danger.

Savor the irony: Robert Oak calls for classic New Deal programs like WPA and CCC. Meanwhile, blogger New Deal Democratic over at Bonddad is singing ‘Everything’s coming up is coming up roses (aka green shoots) and ‘there's going to be a chicken in every pot.’ He is positively happy.

Bonddad doesn’t think of economics in human terms. It’s a game to him. He writes today that there is something in the labor statistics for everyone. The bulls will find good news and bears will find bad. Bulls and Bears being teams that one bets on. There is no humanity in those numbers.

Meanwhile, the most anti labor blogger on the net, Mish is posting heart wrenching stories about the pain and suffering of real people. Go figure.

And, today more happy people at CNBC are falling all over themselves with glee showing the enormous profits that corporations are showing. These same people a couple of months ago did a whole segment on how outrages it was for Bank of American workers to unionize. How dare they want a union and higher wages when taxpayers are supporting B of A. Taxpayer money supporting profits is good – supporting labor bad.

Meanwhile, McClatchy is reporting today the armored vehicles that the defensive industry built for $26.8 billion are being blown up left and right by men in skirts.

"The traditional MRAP was having real problems . . . off road in Afghanistan ," said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell…retired Army Col. Douglas A. MacGregor , a former armored cavalry commander and combat veteran and an expert on armor warfare, said that vehicles such as the MRAP have "very limited utility" in a war against a guerrilla group such as the Taliban …"The notion of a wheeled armored constabulary force as a prescription for a close combat situation is nonsense," he said.

Wages for clerks at B of A are immoral and a threat to the economy. Billions for useless armaments to conquer a country for reason not perfectly clear - not a peep.

These are some really strange times we live in.

post on unemployment and stress tests makes me wonder if things are very bad for financial conglomerates. Theoretically, unemployment is probably a much more important factor then GDP growth because obviously it goes to the potential health of their loan portfolio and credit card portfolio. And with each rise in unemployment probably means more loans in distress and credit card defaults.

Just wondering.

RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.

here (Is Krugman an EP lurker???) Basically he says the reason they don't do it is politics, which is probably correct.

Although I would claim the politics have more to do with private contractors, lobbyists than the "Tea party" crowd.

But what's good is he's raising it and says it needs to be discussed.....

so I guess now the question is, what current administrations, government infrastructure is there which could be quickly built upon to manage directly something like a WPA and/or CCC?

The CCC by itself would be very tricky it today's ACLU insane PC world for it was men only, in camps, being given food, clothing, medical care, free education, training, but only $30/day and $25 of that went directly to their families.

So, you can see the war on that one, even though it was an awesome program, gave us all of those cool trails, roads, state, national parks, swimming pools, all sorts of nice public works which added to U.S. and dare I say tourism to our national and state parks....

but you can see the issues, firstly only guys would raise hell and that implies they would need two camps but the wages are obviously way below minimum wage, so unions as well as minimum wage laws...perhaps they could pay minimum wage yet still offer the rest of the supports?

I think the military frankly would know how to do this....they already have integrated women and men into the military, understand all of these logistics, have their own training system and so on. Of course that would raise hell and hairs having the military involved.

So to me, firstly one needs to lay out the specifics on how it could be done, yes the Federal government directly manages this, makes sure U.S. citizens/perm residents get the jobs, income goes directly to workers plus education, training too.....

John Mauldin broke down the unemployment numbers and showed just how bad they really are.

What I did not see in many of the stories I read was that the number of unemployed actually soared by 558,000, to 15.7 million, as measured by the household survey. The establishment survey polls larger businesses; the household survey actually calls individual households.
Let's look at the real number in the establishment survey. If you don't seasonally adjust the number, the actual change in unemployment for October was 641,000, or about 450,000 more than the seasonally adjusted number. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics added 86,000 jobs that they simply guess were created through the so-called birth-death ratio. Interestingly, the birth-death ratio number is not seasonally adjusted, so it is just added to the unemployment number.
...
My favorite slicer and dicer of data, Greg Weldon (www.weldononline.com), offers up an even more horrific number. As I have noted before, if you have not looked for work in the last four weeks, the BLS does not count you as unemployed. Quoting Greg:
"Moreover, when we combine the monthly change in the number of Unemployed, with the number Not in the Labor Force, we might consider the result to be a proxy for the actual 'change' in the underlying labor market situation ... in which case, October's figure of 817,000 represents the fourth LARGEST yet, behind last month's (September's) second largest figure of 1,021,000 ... for a two-month combined figure of 1.838 million, in newly Unemployed, or no longer 'in' the Labor Force ...
"...the second LARGEST two-month total EVER posted, barely trailing the December-08/January-09 total 1.955 million.
"Bottom line ... basis this measure AND the 'Total Unemployment Rate,' we could conclude that not only is there NO 'improvement' in the labor market, but moreover, that it continues to DETERIORATE, intently."