A jobs program isn't necessarily useless jobs. We don't need to pay people to dig a ditch and then other people to fill in that ditch. As a society, we get cau

A jobs program isn't necessarily useless jobs. We don't need to pay people to dig a ditch and then other people to fill in that ditch. As a society, we get caught up in the idea that a government service has to turn a profit. This comes up all the time with the post office and public transit. Yet we never have a conversation about the fire department or roads turning a profit. These services don't lose money. They simply have a cost. We could have people who fix the roads, for example. Directly. Not by having a tender process that allows some extra entity to leech government funds, not do the thing and cost 5 times as much as they promised. We could be training people in mental health services and providing those services so we can appropriate deal with the problems of homelless people and people having mental health episodes, rather than calling the police, which tends to be about the worst thing you can do as the person having an episode has a pretty high chance of simply ending up dead. Best case scenario, they end up in the criminal "justice" system.