Your understanding of both Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression are inaccurate.

Hoover expanded government intervention and spending after the 1929 crash (see Davis-Bacon Act, Smooth-Hawley Tariff, Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Federal Home Loan Bank Act, etc.) and was ironically criticized by FDR in the 1932 presidential race. FDR’s advisors admit that they basically took Hoover’s plans and expanded them tremendously.

Also, if “the massive government jobs program that was World War II” got us out of the Great Depression, why didn’t the massive government jobs program that was the New Deal get us out in the decade prior to WWII? The reality is that neither of these jobs programs got us out of the depression. It wasn’t until many of the New Deal programs were scaled back or eliminated in the postwar period that private investment grew and with it the collective economic fortunes of many Americans.

For more information, read: http://www.mackinac.org/4013

“Also, and it’s weird that this even needs to be said, there’s an obvious difference between the government creating “make-work” jobs and saving jobs that already existed.”

Actually, there isn’t all that much difference. If the jobs being “saved” are unproductive, and thus in need of a market correction, then the outcome is the same: inefficiency.

Is government’s goal to provide specific purposes or is it a jobs program? Those of us who want education reform treat it like the former, but you and the special interests (teachers unions), fight for the latter at the expense of the former.