Not a good day for economic news...

[whell]

Originally Posted by noonereal

I have said dozens of times that if you want to get the economy out of a recession like this you have to raise taxes and put people to work building infrastructure that will benefit business and society long term.

Big business will not invest in the country so the government needs to tax and do it for their own good as well as the rest of society.

This strikes me as a "living in the past" strategy. Who's going to do all of this infrastructure-building? The unemployed today are largely made up of everyone from home builders to retail middle managers to computer techies to office/clerical workers. 75 years ago when Roosevelt ordered up the likes of the WPA, there were a plethora of workers who were skilled, at least minimally and many were quite skilled, in labor, construction, carpentry, etc. Today, those skills are a bit harder to come by in today's workforce. Not to mention that many of today's workers are averse to getting their hands dirty. Also, the composition of today's workforce is majority female.

So, whose gonna do all this building? I suspect we'd have to import labor to do the type of massive labor infusion / government payroll spending to get the the WPA levels of the 1930's. It's not meant to be an antagonistic question, but rather a "real" assessment of today's labor force versus "yester-year."