It’s very simple:
- An economy can’t overcome hundreds of billions of dollars of debt in one year.
- An economy can’t recover in one year when “real” unemployment is over %10.
By “real” unemployment, I mean people who are capable of working and want to work for compensation or who are on any significant form of tax-backed support; but excluding people who have sufficient non-tax-backed income-generation by other means to support their household (such as “trust fund babies”. I also put “homemaker” as “real” employment. It’s a job like any other, and strongly affects income (negatively or positively). If it weren’t, housekeepers, baby-sitters, pre-school, and day-care would all be non-profitable.
(That’s a complicated way of saying: Real unemployment takes into account only people willing and able to work. It excludes people who have their own means of self-support – like being independently wealthy, or owning your own gold mine.)
So far, our elected officials have done what I’ve expected: