Mr. Blunt and Cranky will drive to work today on roads built by government-funded workers. When there, he will use the Internet, developed partly by the government. He will use water fountains that are supplied by government-funded water systems.

He will be protected by government workers from the military and police and fire departments. On and on the list goes. Taxpayer money providing jobs: that is a pretty tangible return on investment (ROI).

Government-created jobs built much of the infrastructure that we use each day: because there is not a lot of money to be made, private businesses rarely take on such projects.

Today, that infrastructure is crumbling, because much of Congress is delusional enough to think that rational business interests will lose their shirts by taking on such undertakings. They will not. No ethical private-sector organization can or should do so.

While the backbone of our economy is quickly breaking down, our legislators refuse to live in the real world; the world outside of their comfy cocoons, in which real people use the real “products” provided by those government jobs that really do exist.

During the Great Depression, our leaders were wise enough to see that paying people to build things was preferable to paying them to look for jobs in the private sector; especially when there were no effing jobs to be found there.

It is time to give the unemployed the opportunity to work again: to not only provide honest value for the taxpayer’s hard-earned (which the so-called “pro-business types should endorse), but also to provide dignity to those who would be working for their money and providing us all with a better life and the increased opportunities that come from those jobs.

The jobs that modern “Republicans” pretend don’t exist.

Mr. B & C