Paul Krugman's blog today (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/06/why-not-a-wpa/#comments) muses about whether we should have some direct employment programs like the Depression-era Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. He fears it might not be politically feasible, though some of the commenters make persuasive arguments on why it could be.

My father-in-law was in the CCC. My wife remarks about how bad the streets are in St. Louis. The point is there are numerous infrastructure projects that need doing; much of what the CCC created is still with us today in, for instance, the national parks system. Just doing repairs, like the potholes, would be beneficial to the country economically as well as providing jobs. And we could cut out the middleman or, as Krugman puts it, have a "public option" in the stimulus. We could have created a lot of jobs for $700 billion if we had spent it directly on CCC/WPA-type prorams. Let's do the math: this money covers 2 years, so that's $350 billion a year, enough for 10 million $35,000/year jobs for two years, more than covering the 7 milliion jobs lost in this recession. By contrast, what we've actually gotten is 600,000-1 million jobs.

Just sayin'.