Unemployment rate surged to 9.7 percent in August

Toward the end of the Bush administration, President Bush and Congress started spending billions to bail out financial institutions and auto companies in a vain Keynesian attempt to "stimulate" the economy by taxing away more of your income and then giving some of it back to you. President Obama and Congress have continued the vain Keynesian stimulus efforts. Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, has cooperated in the Bush-Obama Keynesian efforts by printing new money like it's going out of style (which it often does, in the form of inflation, when the Fed creates too much of it). Yet we see that despite all of these Keynesian efforts to trick the economy into real growth--or perhaps because of these Keynesian efforts--the economy remains mired in the worst recession since the early 1980s, and, by some measures, since the Great Depression. While the economy isn't suffering anywhere near the contraction in the number of jobs or real incomes per person as it did during the Great Depression--and people shouldn't get hysterical that it will, either--we do have plenty of economic pain to go around.

We could, as both President Kennedy and President Reagan did, get Congress to slash marginal federal income tax rates, increasing the incentive to work, save and invest, thereby stimulating real economic growth as we saw in both the 1960s and 1980s. Obama and Congress, however, seem determined to hold on to as much of your hard earned income as possible, so it seems unlikely we will see cuts in marginal tax rates, much less large cuts. So the near-term prospect for the economy remains bleak.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/business/economy/05jobs.html?th&emc=th