Maxine Waters wants a trillion dollars - YouTube

PrintSmith wrote: Really? You are talking about having an unemployed person work for their current unemployment benefit amount by filling in potholes and digging ditches? Not spending more new money to pay them an amount greater than they are currently realizing in their unemployment check, but actually having them work at manual labor jobs such as digging up and replacing old dilapidated sewer lines with new ones, or sweeping clean the city streets, for the exact same amount of money that they have been getting without doing that labor. Color me skeptical - I need a little more convincing that we are talking about the same idea here. Requiring the unemployed to pick up a shovel in order to collect benefits somehow doesn't mesh with the usual entitlement mentality forwarded by the "progressive" sect.

Yes. Why is that so hard to believe? The real problem here is that too many conservatives assume (and liberals of conservatives, too, frankly), based on crappy media stories, of what the other truly believes. If you look closely at mine, or archer's, or LJ's posts as examples you'd see nowhere that we've ever mandated pure entitlement. All of us have, or still do, work hard for a living - we don't sit on our @$$es expecting everything to be handed to us, nor do we advocate that for anyone else. We do have compassion and expect that our government will help those in need when they need it, and too often that gets twisted to the extreme.

And as I said earlier, I proudly label myself a Progressive, but I don't think it has the same meaning for me as it does you. We exist purely because of, and our lives are continue to be built upon progress - nothing remains the same and if species don't adapt, they are miserable or go extinct. Now if we would start improving upon this problem:
http://www.ted.com/talks/edward_tenner_ ... ences.html
Edward Tenner: Unintended consequences | Video on TED.com
[url=http://www.ted.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;]http://www.ted.com[/url]

Every new invention changes the world -- in ways both intentional and unexpected. Historian Edward Tenner tells stories that illustrate the under-appreciated gap between our ability to innovate and our ability to foresee the consequences.

PrintSmith wrote: Ahhhhh - we're not talking about FDR's WPA that paid minimum wage - we're talking about a new incarnation of the WPA that would be paying out public employee union wage + benefit levels, driving up the unsustainable level of debt creation that every credit rating agency has warned us will result in a lowering of the credit worthiness of the nation's new notes of debt. I knew there had to be a catch in there somewhere.

No, check the article:

WPA-ers would work 120 hours per month for wages that were more than federal relief checks, but far less than union scale wages or a locale's prevailing pay.

It says nothing about benefits...