I made the following comment to a column by Bob Herbert:
It seems that about every other column of yours is essentially the same --- "the jobs situation is horrible. The government must do something to fix it!" I agree with you, but it seems the government is being pretty lethargic about jobs creation. So much political crap who knows if anything serious can get done to fix things. What about we the people directly doing something about creating jobs? Why do we have to be content to just wait for the government to save us? Isn't there anything proactive that we the people could collectively choose to do to try to help fix the jobs situation? I don't have the answer, but some suggestive ideas. Web sites like microplace allow one to invest $1000 as a loan for someone in some third world country to start a business. Why can't we have something like this for the USA? A kind of venture capital fund to start some kind of business to get unemployed people employed again. This doesn't have to be sexy --- basically, are there any small business opportunities that might be able to get started with some seed money and could hire the unemployed. Maybe some small community somewhere doesn't have many restaurants --- give some seed capital to start one! And maybe this fund could be used for the people themselves (not the government) to start a kind of WPA or CCC. It would be nice if we could count on government to fix our unemployment woes, but why not also try to take some initiative ourselves to try to fix the situation. Maybe you and your other columnists at the NY Times (Krugman, Brooks, etc.) could try to make something like this so. Instead of continually writing about the woes of unemployment, maybe you could actually try to do something.
