…but I think I know why they’re so anxious to pass it. Check out this graph of job losses over on speaker.gov:
job losses in the last 3 recessions in the US
Focus your eye on that green line. If things continue on that pace there’ll be mass protests in the streets before 2009 ends – no wonder the politicians are in a frenzy. Cross your fingers folks, we’re in for an uncomfortable year.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 
My big complaint about this is that they haven’t even finished with that first one, never mind that they can’t even account for where the money went or how the financial institutions used it. They are putting A LOT of money/debt on the future with no guarantees.
All I can say is that collectively, we as a country better cross our fingers.
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The job losses are certainly bad news, but I think comparing raw job loss numbers is a bit more complicated than this chart implies. For example, there were around 42 million more people in the civilian labor force in 2007 than there were in 1990, and 16 million more than in 2001. So it seems normal that during a downturn more absolute people would become unemployed.
I think you’d need to dig a bit deeper to quantify the unprecedented nature of this downturn.
(data from ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/lf/aat1.txt)
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