You can hire people to do anything. Dig holes then fill them in. Get rid of tractors and put people out in the fields.

A real productive job is one where the net wealth in existence at the end of the day is greater. If you just use taxpayer money (or borrowed money) to pay people to do things that don't really create any new value, it doesn't do anything for the economy as a whole.

There's sometimes a good reason things aren't getting funded other than by government. Maybe because they're money-losers? To the best of my knowledge, there has yet to be a major mass transit system that creates more wealth in a year than it uses up.

A lot is also being said about "infrastructure."

What's ironic is that for the last few decades the major obstacle to infrastructure construction has been the liberal environmental movement. New highways, new bridges, new power plants, new refineries, new transmission lines, new canals, new dams. What holds them up?

Look up proposals of this type in a given state or locality, preferably some that are local to you for more impact, and see where the actual roadblocks have been, and how much additional cost and time it now takes to jump through all the anti-development hoops. The projects of the New Deal era never needed to deal with anything like this. Try to imagine doing anything nowadays that the TVA (for example) did back then.

Look at a few of the great construction wonders of this country. Hoover Dam, the massive water projects of the West and Northwest, the Golden Gate Bridge, the interstate highway system.

You think any of that would get past first base with all of the environmental impact restrictions today?

The anti-industrial agenda worked for years to eliminate large sectors of "smokestack" and "heavy" industries in this country, and now the same people complain that there are no domestic jobs to be had.