The High Price Of Austerity

David Leonhardt delivers with yet another way of looking at the impact of small government policies on our anemic recovery:

And this, I think, tends to understate the issue. As I've been saying for some time now, on housing we've now undershot on the low side. At one point, we stopped building new homes because we had plenty of homes. Now we're still not building homes even though the population has grown plenty because too many people can't afford to go out and live in one. But if we had these extra million state and local workers that Leonhardt's talking about, several hundred thousand of them would be occupying currently non-existent homes and we'd have less construction unemployment. What's more, all those employed construction workers and librarians and firemen would be shopping at stores and eating at restaurants. That would mean more cashiers, more cooks, more truck drivers, etc.