Contrary to what a number of politicians have asserted in recent days, the current jobless rate is not due to a pervasive desire to cash unemployment checks and lounge around or a desire to become "hobos," as Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) asserted earlier this year.

A new Deloitte study soberly concluded what many employers have suspected for years: The potential employment pool is becoming less and less qualified for the jobs that are available.

It's all about jobs.

With the official unemployment rate up to 9.8 percent and the unofficial rate as high as 15 percent or so, policy makers are talking the talk at least about how jobs are the number one priority.

Paul Krugman today once again bemoans the lack of Keynesianism in what passes for economic policymaking discussions these days, and I share that complaint.

However, Krugman may be missing part of the problem here, which is that those who pooh-pooh the prospect of deflation may actually not much care if it materializes, though they would be mistaken to do so.

I've avoided rehearsing the on-going debate over the bleak macroeconomic picture, because it quickly descends into endless political back and forth along with the usual name-calling, as my colleague Steve Taub and I have been discussing internally today.  But it's time to make an exception:

Is the private sector not hiring because it fears more aggressive action from the public sector, and so the public sector (read Obama administration) should leave the economy to itself, as those on the right claim? Or is the lack of private sector hiring a reflection of a lack of private sector hiring, and thus a vicious circle and market failure that requires the public sector (read Obama administration) to step in with a serious jobs program involving infrastructure, alternative energy and schools, as those on the left insist?

Not to speak for Steve, but my sense is he tends to agree with the first perspective, at least for the most part, and I can safely report that I agree with the second, and would recommend James Surowiecki's recent column to help make my case if I could find it. Since I can't, suffice it to say Surowiecki made the useful observation that the two sectors where hiring is picking up, banking and health care, are those where the government has taken the most aggressive regulatory action.

There's a political debate heating up about companies' hesitancy to invest the cash they're sitting on.

Essentially, the Democrats--or at least those in favor of further government stimulus measures such as a jobs program or at least extended unemployment benefits--argue that companies are wary of spending because of the lack of aggregate consumer demand.

At long last, one writer has seriously addressed the potential problems with more stimulus spending. (I sent Paul Krugman a question about this more than a week ago, via a comment on his blog, but from what I can see he has yet to address it. And Dean Baker too easily dismisses the issue, in my opinion.)

The problem is not the federal budget deficit, not at least in the short term, but the potential political fallout from bad decision making. That way, says Steve Randy Waldman, indeed lay a possible US currency crisis. And this is ultimately where Friedrich Hayek and his associates were coming from in blaming Weimar for the disasters that followed.

There's suddenly lots of talk about the possibility of a "double dip" recession, as if the economy had ever really emerged from the last downturn. 

Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism does a good job of putting the talk in perspective today. In fact, the discussion is ultimately about semantics.

Steve Taub and I were just remarking on how often we see wind farms these days while driving in the countryside, especially in the more remote areas of states such as New York, Minnesota, Texas and Wisconsin.

That discussion followed my mention of data I came across yesterday that shows how little we and the rest of the world are investing in alternative energy and other so-called "green" initiatives, as measured in terms of GDP.

Before I get to the news (which involves the problems of European banks), let me bury the lede and offer up a bit of perspective. Yes, that's totally bass ackwards, but indulge me for a few grafs. (Hey, this is the web.)

We've recently gotten grief from friends here and there about being too negative about the economy. So we've been doing our damndest of late to ensure a "balanced" approach, seeing the glass half full as often as empty, so to speak, or walking on the sunny side of the street in addition to the shady one. You get the picture. Well, sorry, folks, but sometimes reality won't budge.

By this point, press cheerleading for the economy is hardly newsworthy, and I'm not the first to notice the latest example.

But the down-is-up spin on Caterpillar's results cannot escape mention.  As the Business Insider notes, the Bloomberg story is tame by comparison with the ravings on CNBC yesterday.