How are we going to compete internationally...

with 2/5ths of our hands tied behind our back? Less than 60% of us are working!

http://www.businessinsider.com/david-rosenberg-forget-the-unemployment-rate-the-real-nightmare-is-the-employment-rate-2010-1

Isn't full employment economic national security? Can you imagine the effect on Social Security if there were too many jobs available? If immigration wasn't seen as a problem,, but an opportunity?

Why have the feds allow R & D deductions that replace workers with machines, then have to pay idled worker support? What's the hurry? Why not allow technological development to proceed at its own pace, without subsidy?

Perhaps new employers could be encouraged instead, by giving them credits toward future payroll taxes for each new position created that lasts through the year.

Labor is a different type of resource than oil or coal - what isn't used now isn't lying in the ground to be used later. That opportunity to get work done is just gone, and we are all suffering more without it being done.
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There is plenty that needs doing, and is worth doing - for example, every dollar spent on public agricultural R & D yields more than ten dollars of increased value to society, and much of that within a bond's lifetime. The average rate of return per annum for public ag. R & D is over 50% per year:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/eb10/eb10.pdf

There is an opportunity to sell bonds, fund agricultural research and development, and pay for the bond yields out of generally increased federal revenues due to the investment.

There is not an absence of work worth doing, there is only an absence of private work worth doing in this 'recession'. This is why the effort to shrink public expenditure is wrong - we need more investment in public goods, not less, to seed a financial recovery. Not taking care of bridges while the richest profit four times more than they ever did before means that structural changes in the economy due to technology have inordinately favored those already favored by fate. Taxing the rich, too, to fix bridges and develop the crops that can feed us through this climate crisis only makes sense.

Haiti is lying in ruins and 2/5ths of us are sitting around with nothing to do, not to mention that portion of the 'working' who are merely parasitical - witness the recent year's world food price peak now known to be due to the 'work' of speculators:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8844
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The world can no longer afford weapons 'investments' when there is so much green infrastructure needed, and needed now, to avoid further Russian wildfires and wheat yield depression, further flooding death and destruction in Pakistan and China. If these weapons are used, other investments will be destroyed, and more people will suffer. Even if the weapons are merely stockpiled, the effort and resources that could have gone to a productive use are wasted. Weapons are attacks on the best of capitalism. We don't have wars between US states to settle differences, and we thrive as a result, compared to the Middle East and such.