Care: effective and equitable job creation

Nancy Folbre references some research my colleagues at Levy Economics Institute and I have done: Improving Home-Care Services, Creating Jobs - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com. I'll wait while you go read her post . . .
Long story short from our research : $50 billion would provide early childhood education for the entire country, employ more people than $50 billion in infrastructure construction spending, and provide those jobs to people from the lowest income families. More effective and more equitable than most other spending in last year's too-small stimulus package.

EPI: unemployed/job ratio is 5.6

Not great, but at least it's not growing like it did all of last year: Unemployed workers outnumber job openings 5.6-to-one in March.

Still Shedding Jobs

Today's employment report from the BLS shows that we are still shedding jobs (only 85,000 this month, though; woo-hoo!). The unemployment rate remains 10%. Graphs like this one (from Calculated Risk) help make clear why some folks call the the Great Recession. You can see that the employment-population ratio hasn't been this low since 1983. This is most likely not because people are opting for more leisure.

Update:Here's a link to the BLS employment report.