I understand a lot of folks are not in a position to spend much, but I am thinking of buying my first house (for my own reasons, not to boost the economy). Since I live in an area where a house is realistically going to cost at least $250,000 at a bare minimum, that would make up for a lot of people on tight budgets.

Buying more consumer-oriented toys at Wal-Mart won't solve our problems, but it's not because consumers don't have enough money to make a dent. It's because buying a plasma display doesn't add enough value to the world we live in. Buying an education does. Once we get our priorities straight, everything else will follow.

Consuming materialists convinced of their right to consume and be entertained.

Their soulessness and the harvest of meaninglessness and now upon them.

You propose a WPA-style solution to our economic problems. I concur. Infrastructure is seriously messed up, and it only makes sense to do something which at once employs people and adds value to the common enterprise.

The one additional suggestion I will make is that the new WPA equivalent include a massive program on the space effort. Sure, many of the jobs demand high technical expertise. But for every engineer, there must be ten jobs that need doing that an engineer is too highly trained to do. I say space because that is the one area no one is concentrating on and in which we can again become a leader. We could achieve a regular space-faring ability within ten years, and become a leader among nations again.

In my opinion, it is a bad sign when a troubled government retreats from its initiatives of exploration and discovery, as the U. S. has done ever since the Apollo program. In my opinion, the argument that it costs too much to go to space when we have so many problems here is fallacious. (The whole point of a WPA approach would be to lessen the cost, incidentally.) The point is fresh thought, fresh discovery, not grudging contraction while we waste more and more money on intractable situations.

Plan to recommend this approach on Obama's website.

Would we be in this predicament if wealth had been distributed a bit more equitably over the last twenty years? Would we have near as many foreclosures if the average persons earnings had risen even a relatively small percentage? I tend to think that this could have been so easily avoided that the moves taken to get us here should be crimes.

...except the government's purse is ours. Unless you advocate borrowing still more money from those stellar human rights leaders China and Saudi Arabia? No, I'm afraid telling the US Government to go shopping isn't going to fix this situation.

Amazingly, author completely missed the main point. What good does it do to go on a spending spree to take advantage of low priced imported merchandise? How many TV's, computers, even automobiles are produced in the United States? By buying marked down imported items, where the merchant makes a minimal profit and perhaps even a loss, we only contribute to the negative cash flow to countries like China and others.

Going back on the gold standard, as the gold bugs promote, won't solve the money problem. There is not enough gold in the world to support the world's currency needs. The result will be massive deflation. Besides, the gold standard is no more rational than any other standard. "I've found metal. I'm rich! I haven't. I'm poor!" "I have a cow. I'm rich! I don't. I'm poor. For centuries, the world struggled with a monetary system that tried to supply money by using dual backing, usually silver. In the 16th century, Sir Thomas Gresham pointed out that this wouldn't work. Why not? Google Wikipedia.

That something makes sense is of course not enough for the Reagan-Bush-Bush indoctrinated Americans that social spendings are BAD. Ideology is more important.

Hell, you morons have had it coming for decades, and deserve every bit of it!

Per HTWW "The best guess is that the economy is currently contracting at a rate of 4 percent per quarter."

HTWW has admitted on several occasions it "doesn't do math" deciding instead to "skip it". Here we go again. Even the econ rookies know that all growth rates are annualized. Not HTWW.

I think it's clear that 30 some-odd years of consumer-based economic policy have landed us exactly where it should have -- up to our eyeballs in debt and since we're not the world's cheapest workers, out of work.

I've been laid off twice during the current recession. You can give me all the fiscal stimulus you want, you can wave all kinds of sales in front of my face, but what I need is work. And not the reactive, consumer-based kind. There are a bunch of things we need to do on a national scale:

- repair roads and bridges

- staff schools -- Hire a bunch of us as TAs. We can work with teachers to grade papers and do paperwork while they do what they're good at.

- build an electrical network that is based on the Internet

- build a high speed internet framework that is accessible to all

- rebuild our rail system

Heck -- I always wonder why the unemployment office doesn't put people to work on a part-time basis as part of their benefits.

The money to revive the economy is buried in the trade figures. If you were to take the money that this country spends on imports and instead invested in the domestic manufacturing capacity, think how many jobs would be created. Instead we waste it on TVs built in China. This does not help U.S. economy. Apart from Wal-Mart, who else gains from the sale of this TV set? And even if this TV is cheap, imagine if it were to cost more, but its manufacturing had created jobs domestically, how much more it would have benefited American economy. It just shows the absurdity of the U.S. economy, whether in cheap gas, cheap electronics, etc. Cheap gas is what got us to the point where we are on the edge of destroying our automotive industry. The key is, everyone selling in this country or any other country, must benefit the local economy by producing the goods locally. How else are consumers going to have the money to buy the products? Each country has its own set of imposed costs, which make products produced in that country more or less expensive to produce. Trade simply moves unemployment from one country to another.