Subotai Bahadur,
Thank you for the story. I hope your little girl is well now.

elby,
Methinks the real unemployment rate is around 20%. The government only counts people who are getting unemployment. If you are working a part time job or if you have been out of work for over one year and the unemployment stops then you are no longer counted. Did you see the report that NY State stopped payments to an unemployed lawyer who had stated on her blog that she was making $1.30/month in revenue from her blog ads?

bogie wheel,
Good work. The 2009 Statistical Abstract says that in 2006 there were 5,128,000 State workers and 14,199,00 local government employees, rounded to the nearest thousand for each. Read it and weep and note the trends, http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/tables/09s0443.pdf.

tanstaafl,
Correct, the Stimulus is really the trillion dollar slush fund.

A truly honest politician would walk into a room full of retirees and tell them the truth.

There are three groups of people in America.

1) Those in this room who voted to give their wealth to other people who had retired over the last 60 years.

2) Those who voted to set up the system that gave them the money, who have already received it and are now dead.

3) Those who are now working or who are going to work in the future. You expect that third group to send you their money because you sent your money to someone else. They may not want to do that.

The money that the people in this room are expecting to get from the government is not your money. Forget that idea, it simply is not true. Your money was already spent on other people. That is the system that you and the people you sent your money to voted for.

Given that you are asking the workers of the future to support a life expectancy, standard of living and level of medical care vastly greater than that which would have been available to people when this Ponzi scheme was set up 70 years ago and given that doing so will condemn those future workers and their children to a lower standard of living and life expectancy and given that if you and those you sent your money to had instead supported a smaller role for government and increased investment in the productive economy then both you and the future generations would not be facing these financial constraints you are asking a lot, indeed to much, of the future and something must change.

We can unbundle ourselves of this burden and do so humanely over a 20 year period. We must begin.