It is the small scale of the thing that is the issue
Paying companies to hire the unemployed
http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/18/news/economy/unemployed-subsidized-jobs/index.htm?source=cnn_bin
This is what our dysfunctional government should be doing with its stimulus dollars. Instead of enriching the already rich (have you heard of the _trillions_ of practically interest-free loans the government has given to Wall Street? What could you do with that?), which is fairly well proven to not help the economy one damn bit (while I don’t disagree with the TARP bailout in principle (the economy was going full-speed off a cliff), I totally disagree with the massive gift with absolutely no strings attached and I get really really upset that the rationale was to bail out because they were too big to fail and now they are even bigger!), help put people back to work by actually putting them to work for ‘free’. Companies now faced with all this ‘free’ labor (taint free, it is all out of our taxpayer pockets (but so is all the ‘free’ money going to Wall Street!)) are almost certainly going to ramp up business, since it is nearly risk free, and that would likely be just the shot-in-the-arm the economy needs to get going again (most of the economic ‘growth’ babbled about now is stocks and Wall Street, ordinary companies are still reluctant to hire).
Of course, the idea of our dysfunctional government doing anything like this is out of the question. The GOP even turns rabid against ideas it was promoting just a few years ago because their single goal is to get that damn black man out of the white house, the entire rest of the country can go into depression for all they care.
