One of the enduring misunderstandings that Europeans have about the USA is, they assume that if the national government isn't doing something, then nothing real or substantial is being done.

It's not a misunderstanding, because it mostly isn't.

It's nice that the US is a veritable capitalist utopia of convivial communality, but if all anyone can see is the shanty-town poor when you visit the rougher areas, it's hard to be convinced that there's a plan at all, never mind that the plan is working.

If you don't have a government ethic of communality - which the US doesn't, particularly - then it's no surprise that federal programs don't currently work.

That doesn't mean they can't in principle, it means you no longer have the culture to do them properly, which isn't quite the same thing.

So if you're going to tell me that the glories of free enterprise have stepped in to fill the gap across the US, I'm going to have to ask what evidence there is that this has made any real difference.

If the private sector is so all-powerful, it should surely have solved the problem by now. It's not as if there's been a lot of hostility to private efforts from Washington for the last decade or so.

And yet - the trend has been for lower wages, longer hours, poorer infrastructure, and more unemployment. What's wrong with this picture?

As for job creation - are you saying the New Deal didn't actually work at all? The freeways, the dams, the infrastructure were just pointless make-work?