This is a Cato special podcast. I'm Caleb Brown. The Obama administration wants a job

stimulus, but little of the proposed spending indicates that spurring job creation is the actual goal.

Mark Calabria, director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute,

believes it's possible that most senior staffers in the Obama administration

don't know a whole lot about how sustainable jobs get created.

The notion of a job itself is always a quandary because we see this tension, for instance, and that productivity has grown and the way that

economies grow is we end up being able to do more with less but in the short term

that means job losses none of us lose sleep that we no longer a country where

75% of his work in agriculture. We think it's a good thing that only about 3% of

us working agricultural.

But the process to get there was quite painful.

You know, certainly people thought at the time

that farmers being put out of work in the 20s

was not a pretty process.

But in the long run, that's how countries get wealthy.

So I wouldn't say that all of what we're going through now is that same sort of adjustment,

but of course some of it is. You know, whether we are better or worse off as a country

because close to 2 million of us are no longer working as construction workers when close to 2 million of us more.

We're working as construction workers a few years ago.

It's not clear cut.

I mean, clearly you don't want to keep a housing bubble for instance going solely for the

sick of construction workers going when you have too many houses.

...