It's depressing to recognize that our political system is unable to respond the obvious way to the unemployment problem. I blame the Obama administration to a great degree, as they never made the case for what their fantasy stimulus would actually look like. Either they think they've done enough, in which case they're wrong, or they think there's stuff they should do but can't get through Congress, in which case... I'd like to know what that stuff is!
If it ever penetrates the skulls of our lawmakers that 9.7% unemployment with a tremendous amount of long term unemployment is, you know, bad, and they consider how to deal with such problems in the future, there are ways around the logjam. At the very least they could increase the automatic stabilizers, for example having high unemployment rates automatically trigger unemployment benefit extensions instead of having to take it to a vote.
