Another month, another half-million Americans out of work. The ranks of the unemployed have now stretched beyond 11 million, and millions more are underemployed — working part time, for example, because they can’t find full-time jobs.

As bad as this sounds, the reality confronting working men and women is actually significantly worse. Some 2.6 million jobs have been lost since December 2007, and as the Economic Policy Institute tells us:

“Just to keep up with the ever-expanding labor force, the economy would have needed to create 1.5 million jobs over the last 12 months. This means that the 2.6 million jobs lost leaves us over 4 million jobs short of what the economy required to provide employment for the American work force.”

We’re in employment quicksand. The official unemployment rate (a notoriously rosy statistic) is 7.2 percent. But more than one in every eight workers in America is jobless or underemployed. That’s 21 million people. And it’s not even counting the so-called discouraged workers, who have given up looking for a job.

More than a million jobs were lost in November and December, and millions more are projected to vanish this year. When the November job losses were announced, David Leonhardt wrote in The Times’s blog, Economix:

“The share of all men ages 16 and over who are working is now at its lowest level since the government began keeping statistics in the 1940s. The share of women with jobs has fallen almost two percentage points from the peak it reached in 2000. At no other point in the past 50 years has the share of employed women fallen so much from its peak.”

This is an emergency. There is one overriding mission for the incoming Obama administration when it comes to dealing with the economy, and that’s putting Americans back to work. Forget the G.O.P.’s mania for tax cuts. Forget, for the time being (but not forever), the ballooning budget deficits. Forget the feel-good but doomed-to-fail effort to play nice-nice with the rabid partisans of the right who were the ones most responsible for ruining the economy in the first place.

Put the people back to work!

To do that, Democrats will have to overcome their natural timidity. They will have to fend off the Republican opposition in Congress and set in motion an enormous surge of public spending aimed at creating jobs, jobs, jobs.

Each new surge of job losses is an additional violent assault on the already profoundly damaged economy. Idle workers do not pay taxes and that ratchets up budget deficits at the federal, state and local levels. They draw down unemployment benefits and further strain the Medicaid rolls. In many cases, they are forced to turn to food stamps for their families’ daily bread. And, of course, they stop purchasing cars and homes, goods and services.

The economy will not be saved by putting a pitiful $500 into the hands of the average taxpayer. And it won’t be saved by gift-wrapped concessions to the G.O.P. in the form of business tax cuts that the president-elect is said to be considering.

With credit tight, savings depleted, the stock market in the tank and home prices in a state of collapse, the only way to get real money into the hands of ordinary Americans (and thus back into the economy) is through employment. The way to truly stimulate the economy and save the jobs of anxiety-ridden workers who are still employed is to get the unemployed back to work as soon as possible.

And the way to create jobs is through infrastructure investments (building and repairing roads, bridges, tunnels and water and sewer systems); and by investing in 21st-century clean energy initiatives, in public transportation systems, and in school construction; and by providing access to health care for the millions who don’t have it.

In other words, by investing in the people and the enormous productive capacity of the United States.

Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa was blunt this week after he and other Senate Democrats met with Obama aides to discuss the president-elect’s stimulus package. “There is only one thing we have got to do in the stimulus, and that is how can we create jobs,” he said.

Referring to Mr. Obama’s national economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, Mr. Harkin added: “I am a little concerned by the way that Mr. Summers and others are going at this in that, to me, it still looks like a little more of this trickle down. If we just put it in at the top, it’s going to trickle down.”

Been there. Done that. Didn’t work.

The madness of trickle down and its corollaries ruined the economy and millions of Americans with it. President-elect Obama ran to the mantra of change. One hopes he is not too timid to deliver.

There’s more evidence today of Israeli use of cluster bombs, originally noted by Laura Doty at Oxdown. The Times of London features a photo in it’s coverage (see Gaza Conflict slide show) with the following description:

An artillery round sends out bomblets above Gaza City, which continues to be attacked by Israeli forces

Since the beginning of the Israeli invasion, 500 people in Gaza were killed, of which approximately 70 children and 27 women. By now, a total of 2,650 Gazans are injured of which more than 270 children and 650 women. Despite the Israeli recurrent discourse, facts are clear and Israel’s war has mainly been conducted against civilians.

The medical and health situation in Gaza is on the edge of collapse, facing a severe lack of vital medical supplies. Surgeries are now made without anaesthesias or sterile equipment, as anaesthetics, sterile medical gloves or needles are sometimes no longer available.

The heath sector in Gaza was already qualified as ‘in crisis’ before the beginning of the Israeli attacks and is now overloaded with severe injured and traumas resulting from the air strikes and ground operation. Before the beginning of the recent crisis, 105 medicines for severe and chronic diseases were reported lacking. All basic medical supplies are lacking, and the situation has worsened since the main warehouse stocking medicines in Gaza was bombed last week.

The 13 governmental hospitals from Gaza provide 1,500 beds and chronic patients such as suffering from hearth problems or cancers were sent home. Half of the 60 ambulances available in the Strip are out of order, struck by Israeli strikes.

It is worth mentioning that the official number of casualties could be much higher than reported, as dozens of wounded residents who suffered mild or even moderate injuries were release without registration due to the overcrowded hospitals as the Israeli offensive continues.

In related news, Israel announced on Sunday that it will not allow humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, due to the ongoing ground offensive. Israeli security officials said that the Israeli security would decide in the coming days whether to allow trucks carrying humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip.

I see the number on my caller ID; my heart races. I answer my cell phone.

"We ...are under..heavy bombardment. Heavy bombardment" says my father in terrified, articulated syllables.

"They are bombing the Legislative Council building next to our house. They are bombing just down our street."

"Baba...are you safe, are you both safe??" I ask, not knowing what else to say.

"I have to go now..I have to go...i just wanted to tell you that..but I have to go..." he stammers. And the line goes dead.

Let's engage in a back of the envelope exercise for a moment: the cost of conservatism to America. Right wingers want to de-emphasize the costs, and pump up the virtues. They want to account for every penny of liberal projects but declare that conservative projects have no price. Take Lawrence Lindsey for example. The Iraq War is a treasure beyond price. But he offers a standard: what's the value over 15 years, with 300 trillion of total output? Well let's break down the cost in a kind of rough and ready way.

The costs of conservatism, in a bi-partisan form, are those things that can't be fixed by a Democratic President because they have become part of the political landscape: over-financialization of the American economy, the waste of privatized health care, over militarization of the American economy, and the externalization of global warming. Each one of these things has a cost in GDP, and we can take that total over Lindsey's preferred time frame of 15 years. Then we can ask what that costs in the present.

The cost of not having comprehensive national health care is roughly 5% of GDP because America spends 15% of GDP on health care, and a comprehensive system generally saves 1/3 over privatized systems. The cost of over financialization is estimated by Krugman to be 3% of GDP. The difference between the Bush defense department, including the neo-colonial wars, is 2% of GDP, that's defense plus .

The cost of global warming? Harder to say, in 2005, the mean of estimates surveyed by Tol was 93 dollars a ton. The news has gotten worse since then, with many of the low estimates that dragged down the median already being disproved. But let's be cautious and take that number for the moment. That's 4% of GDP, but we have to take the present value of that first, since it is over a long time horizon - from that we get roughly 2% of GDP. I could easily double this number by tossing out the large numbers of estimates which rely on scenarios which have already been trashed by the facts.

Added up, this is 12% of output, or using Lindsey's 15 year time frame 36 trillion dollars. These problems reinforce each other, insurance companies shift output from other activities, to financial ones. Spending on wars means there is less productive manufacturing, and more war manufacturing, pushing effort into juggling money. Tax breaks drain investment from private enterprise, making it harder, seemingly to shift the economy. In other words, we are like the person who drinks too much because they smoke too much.

So what's the value of that, right now? Well, taking a real interest rate of 2%, that's the historical value roughly, and compounding monthly, that's a present value of 27 trillion real 2008 dollars. Or about twice the value of everything Americans are going to do this year. Ross Perot and others like to talk about the cost of unfunded liabilities, like Social Security and Medicare, running to a present future value of 40 trillion. It's the same kind of back of the envelope number as presented here - based on a present future value of estimates of a long term stream. This means that the cost, over 15 years, of conservatism to America, is two thirds of the supposed crisis in costs - out to an infinite time horizon.

So what does this exercise mean? It's really very simple: we can afford a decent retirement and decent living standards, and decent medicine for ourselves and our children and grand children, or we can afford the casino games that we have played, and the massive parade ground military that we have built over the last generation. But not both. The costs of the war and bad economic policy flow all through the economy.

The reality is that liberalism isn't broken. The reality, contra the film IOU-USA, is that the national debt is a symptom not a cause. The real cause is that Americans have voted for certain things - a huge military, a casino economy, and an anti-science bias - cost be damned. Well the cost is damning, it is damning us to this recession, and it is going to damn us to a very poor recovery on the other side of it.

Yes, these are back of the envelope numbers, but we've been living on pulled from flatulant air numbers on things like WMD in Iraq, the cost of the Bush tax package, the future of global warming, and the value of Mortgage Backed Securities.

Dismissing any notion that the country’s political center has shifted after the Democratic routs in 2006 and 2008, Bush turns to the Center-Right Nation canard in his interview with RCP.

"I still think we're a right-of-center country," the President responded when asked whether the election offered proof that the ideological center of the country had shifted to the left.

"I think most Americans want their government to be effective, results-oriented, efficient," the President said.

"They would like to pay as little a tax as possible. They want their military to be strong, viable, and effective. They want their public leaders to promote personal responsibility by living responsible lives. Most people are - from the cultural side, believe in an Almighty. The question is how you take those basic beliefs and explain them, either through policy or words, in a way where there's common understanding."

While Mitch McConnell and other Republicans have hinted that their opposition to investment in the Big Three is all about busting the unions, Jim DeMint refreshingly came out and admitted it yesterday on NPR.

Norris: Now, you know the unions are saying this is also a political ploy on the part of the Republicans to try get rid of unions and use the auto industry troubles to do just that.

DeMint: Well, I’m not trying to get rid of the unions, but I am saying that they appear to be an antiquated concept in today’s economy.

And if that wasn't explicit enough for you...

DeMint: These car companies are in real trouble. And they should’ve been planning to restructure for a long time. But the political aspect of this is most of this is being done to protect unions, uh, it’s not to protect the workers. And what I want to do is make sure we have jobs for these workers and we have first-class American automobile companies. And we’re not going to do it with the barnacles of unionism wrapped around their necks.

I'm not saying Jim DeMint is using the credit crisis to take down the unions, but he does appear to be a union-busting asshole.

"The taxpayers should not be obligated to prop up these union bosses who have put the American car companies against the wall, with these contracts and threat of strikes over the last several decades that have essentially put them out of business."

I would like to remind people that in 1993 William Kristol circulated an influential memo arguing that any and all health care proposals coming out of the Clinton Administration should be opposed "sight unseen." He couldn't be bothered by honestly assessing the merits of the Clinton health care plan, he wanted the Republicans to just crush it to stop the Democrats from attaining any victory.

The potential for Republican defection is a new thing. Conservatives have long recognized — and worked hard to prevent — the danger of a breakdown in party discipline. In 1993, William Kristol, then chairman of the Project for the Republican Future, orchestrated the defeat of the Clintons’ health care plan. In an influential memo, Mr. Kristol wrote: “Any Republican urge to negotiate a ‘least bad’ compromise with the Democrats, and thereby gain momentary public credit for helping the president ‘do something’ about health care, should also be resisted. ...The plan should not be amended; it should be erased.”

The Big Three’s production cost in the U.S., including the cost of supporting retirees, is about $75 an hour per worker, according to a recent Canadian Auto Workers Union study. For foreign automakers with plants in the U.S. – without the same retiree costs – the average is $60 to $65 an hour, the study found.

Since 2000, employment-based health insurance premiums have increased 100 percent, compared to cumulative inflation of 24 percent and cumulative wage growth of 21 percent during the same period.

Workers are now paying $1,400 more in premiums annually for family coverage than they did in 2000.

The annual premium that a health insurer charges an employer for a health plan covering a family of four averaged $12,100 in 2007. Workers contributed nearly $3,300, or 10 percent more than they did in 2006. The annual premiums for family coverage significantly eclipsed the gross earnings for a full-time, minimum-wage worker ($10,712).

It is estimated that 50% of all personal bankruptcies occur because of medical expenses.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust, premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance in the United States have been rising four times faster on average than workers’ earnings since 2000.

American leadership is good both for America and for the world; and that such leadership requires military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to moral principle.

America has a vital role in maintaining peace and security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. If we shirk our responsibilities, we invite challenges to our fundamental interests.