This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 6, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Unemployment is up again and the likelihood of extended high unemployment has gone up as well again.

In light of the new numbers, should we really have much confidence in the projections of those

who will soon be peddling stimulus, part two.

Mark Calabria, director of financial regulation studies at the Cato

Institute, comments.

There's no economic statistic that matters more in Washington than unemployment.

Idle factories do not vote.

It's the workers that vote.

So it would be that matters more than anything else.

We could actually probably be producing less, and if you're hiring more people it's probably a better

political outcome might not be a better outcome for the economy.

That's why there's always that sort of tension when it comes to productivity.

On one hand, we are much better as a nation

if we produce more with less,

but for those workers who are less, they themselves are not better off.

So there's that trade-off between, you know, one, it's the trade-off of the scene versus the

unseen, and it's the trade-off of long run versus short-run.

I don't know anybody who thinks we'd be better off

if three-fourths of us were working in agriculture again.

But clearly that was the case of the economy at one time.

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