the white house floating this week like an infrastructure bank to fund major construction projects, doing more repairs and upgrades to u.s. schools, fast tracking trade agreements, the building of new highways and repair of existing ones. all ideas of hiring workers and putting money back into the economy in the short-term to get things moving. also extending unemployment benefits for people who can t find new jobs, given the news the average job search is getting longer, now over 40 weeks. even if we can t get a political consensus for say building schools or roads, surely in the short-term we can agree to extend unemployment benefits. workers paid into the unemployment system for themselves when they were working, now they need those benefits. every dollar we spend on unemployment insurance is worth $1.61 to the rest of the economy. surely we re not going to undo this one thing that everyone
again the breaking news this evening is that the standard & poor s rating agency has downgraded the american credit rating for the first time in u.s. history. our aaa rating is now a aa-plus rating according to standard & poor s. barney frank on this show earlier this hour saying the rating agencies, standard & poor s particularly should not be having made multi-trillion computational errors in coming up with their downgrade decision. in the midst of that, this week the white house started to float a number of proposals, they said, to get the economy going. whether or not your main concern is jobs or your main concern is the deficit, the only way out is jobs and economic growth. the white house floating this week like an infrastructure bank to fund major construction projects, doing more repairs and upgrades to u.s. schools, fast tracking trade agreements, the building of new highways and repair of existing ones. all ideas of hiring workers and putting money back into the