It's clear that the massive investments in housing over the last few years won't produce the returns we expected. Yes, we're going to suffer because those were

It's clear that the massive investments in housing over the last few years won't produce the returns we expected. Yes, we're going to suffer because those were bad investments. But look at the bigger picture. We have productive economic resources (labor), why should they ever be sitting idle? It's not like we don't have problems to solve. We have to pay off our debt to the Chinese. We have to figure out what to do when the oil runs out. We have to make sure we don't destroy the planet sometime during the next century. We need to figure out how to take care of all the baby boomers once they retire. There's LOTS of work we need to be doing, but we're sitting around twiddling our thumbs. That makes no sense.