out of the projects in the slideshow, i have seen/used 5. i live in north carolina and the blue ridge parkway is still amazing. i love that there's no development allowed around it. it's beautiful and actually a useful road in the mountains. i've seen the alameda courthouse and it's still fantastic-looking and very much in use. i've used the new york tunnel and bridge on trips to new york. the fact that these projects are still in use and are in fact landmarks in terms of durable engineering and (often) impressive beauty is a powerful testament to the effectiveness of the new deal.

and in the most broad sense of the word "used," in my college work on documentary studies, the work of dorothea lange, walker evans, and james agee (only three of the many, many artists on the government payroll in the 30s) are still studied. these three talents alone have been crucial in shaping the american documentary and photographic tradition and in addition to the artistic power of their work, continue to provide a way into the lived history of the time that accounts of numbers of people employed or dollars spent don't even come close to conveying.

speaking of the dow jones, hasn't it gone up by around 100 points each of the last three days? i was wondering what was going on there...i figured they all thought the bottom was near. guess they were all just hoping that the stimulus would pass already...

not sure if this has already been mentioned, but slate had a ridiculous article on friday about israeli politics that downplayed this party's racism and somehow came to the conclusion that it was going to dismantle the settlements. maybe you can drop them a line or at least ridicule them in public ;)

http://www.slate.com/id/2210633/

i wonder what one of the gop senators who voted against extending unemployment benefits, against funding for food stamps, and against increased aid to states would say to these people's faces. i want them to say to either of these people that what they need is a tax cut. they don't need a tax cut because they have no income to tax - they need a job and immediate financial assistance.

it's a good history, but the personal note at the end left me cold. i kept thinking about how happy i am that recently my husband and i have saved a little bit of money so that if both of us were to be unemployed for a few months, we would be ok (my goal is to have enough to cover full expenses for 6 months of both of us being unemployed - including possible moving expenses. paranoid? maybe...but with this economy...).

who needs to invest savings? bank accounts work. and it's not like we're actively denying ourselves. i think both of us don't have a lot of consumer impulses. we like to buy books and clothes at thrift stores. we don't buy music, we don't see a lot of movies out, we don't go out much with friends (most of our friends prefer spending time together in homes). our big weakness is food (and ok, video games, but they're so expensive that you have to think hard before you get one). we love eating out, getting delivery, and buying the occasional fancy cheese. but we're lucky enough to share that priority and to have a little financial cushion. we made it a goal to save when we got our current jobs about a year ago and i think that as the time has passed, we were both really surprised at how little self deprivation it took. maybe because we each had a period of unemployment in the past and before we got these jobs had very low paying jobs and so were accustomed to the inexpensive lifestyle, but i guess the big achievement was that even though we started getting paid a little bit more, we didn't spend much more.

anyway, my point was that just because the author feels confident enough in a future of steady income to fantasize about going to wherever instead of saving a little, us young people who are fighting tooth and nail to get a foot in the door need to save to avoid possible destitution in the very looming near future where it seems incredibly likely that no one will have a permanent source of income.