The progressive issue many progressives don't seem to like

[Selatius]

95. That balance sheet recession wouldn't have happened if people didn't borrow excessively.

Since the 1980s, people replaced lost income with cheap credit or borrowing against their homes to sustain a particular living standard. Well, that was untenable in the long-run. The income was lost when manufacturing centers started moving off-shore to cheaper places, and the jobs that came after were lower wage service sector jobs. Things came to the front far faster after certain parties began manipulating housing prices to make a quick buck, and prices soared to unrealistic levels. Of course the bubble was going to pop. Then, other groups made the situation unimaginably worse by selling risky financial instruments built upon those mortgages before essentially taking out insurance policies on those instruments they knew would fail down the road.

I think we can all agree that what we have now is lack of aggregate demand for products and services, and until that is resolved, unemployment and underemployment is going to be a very big issue for a long time. If people are able to pay off their debts or at least get them under control, there would be more money being spent on products and services, as opposed to financing of debts. The stimulus package was derided as pork barrel spending precisely because a large portion of it was nothing but tax cuts to special interests and money towards roads and bridge construction/repair. There was very little in the form of actually putting money into people's pockets in a massive way. A jobs program the size of PWA/WPA that directly hires people and pays them to do work would've helped the situation. Stimulating an economy through simple tax cuts is, in any scenario, one of the least efficient methods of doing it, but it looks good politically.