I still remember the Development Areas programme under Harold Wilson. Great idea, nominating areas of high unemployment as Development Areas and pouring in loads of taxpayers money to ensure factories got moved to the north- east and Scotland. The companies bought the deal then as soon as it was legally and economically convenient, closed the factories and left everyone as badly off as before.
I don't believe you can artificially correct unemployment, not by trusting the good nature of private enterprise anyway. If there are no real jobs to do these trainees will be out of the door as soon as the government money dries up. And then what? Training has a limited shelf life. You might know how to weld the underside of a vehicle or spray paint an SUV - but if the recession is a long one and you have had no chance to use those skills then employers wont look at you twice.
Far better, I believe, if government money is used in government directed schemes - road building or housing, for example where the work is guaranteed for a considerable period of time. Unless you suspend the whole principle of capitalist based economics, attempts to artificially keep people employed are doomed to failure, in my opinion. I wish Brown's initiative well but I fear for the success of it.
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The problem with your alternative is the fact that the public sector is so risk averse by its very nature (because they are spending public money) that the bloody recession would be over by the time they had devised their plans, consulted endlessly with all and sundry, done due diligence and subjected everything to overview and scrutiny, recruited the workforce etc.
The Government needs to breath life into the rotting corpse of capitalism NOW, not in 3 years time.
I agree that its a case of weighing which does the least damage and, for the reasons I gave, I simply don't trust the private sector to use the money in the way the Government intends. I don't think this kind of hand-out will 'breathe life into the rotting corpse of capitalism' as you so graphically put it.
It will take a painfully long time but business confidence has to be restored before anything like full employment will be restored, and that has to be done through using such fiscal instruments in the hands of the Chancellor and the Bank of England to get money flowing again.
As I said, I sympathise with the aim, obviously, but one could (if cynical) suggest this might be a gambit to pull the next election out of the fire with no hope of long term sustenance.
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