Countless academics who have never stepped foot off a college campus have alleged the reason we’re all here is to better our understanding of the humanities and sciences and leave as well-rounded people with a passion for knowledge.

We know better. In reality, the process of elimination brought us all to college, as we knew we didn’t want to join the Air Force and you can’t get to the NBA straight from high school anymore. Oh, and we’d all like high-paying jobs. Unfortunately, massive recessions aren’t conducive to employment opportunities for recent college graduates, and instead of sitting pretty with four-year degrees, some of us will soon be left scrambling with an art history diploma in one hand and a Cold Stone application in the other. It might not be the end of the world as we know it, but two months mashing candy into ice cream would leave anyone hoping the Mayans were right.

Recently, in an attempt to either justify their government paychecks or predict the future, the Wisconsin Department of Revenue forecasted that state unemployment would reach 8.9 percent by the end of 2009 and would top out in 2010 at 9.1 percent. This was by no means a comforting analysis, but most people would rather take a steady descent into poverty than a freefall. Of course, if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the last year, it’s that the people who are trained to know the economy have absolutely no idea what they’re doing. You can lock 12 monkeys in a room with typewriters, and if you give them enough time, they’ll eventually devolve into Jim Cramer.

I say this because just last Friday the Department of Workforce Development, which apparently isn’t the DOR, but I guess does the same thing, announced the state unemployment rate hit 9.4 percent for the month of March, shattering the DOR’s peak with a whole year to spare. Hopefully, this means the worst is behind us and we can all expect to be welcomed into the job force with open arms, but I fear that just like Jackie Wilson said, this’ll just keep lifting higher and higher.

So, who you gonna call (out)? We can’t blame Bush for everything, and even if we could, shooting fish in a barrel isn’t as fun when you’re too poor to buy fish. Or barrels. Personally, the most interesting culprit in an era defined by free homes and little oversight — the financial Woodstock, man — is a recently popular buzzword: pork-barrel spending. Joining other popular political buzzwords such as “lockbox” and “9/11,” pork-barrel spending happens when federal money goes to local projects with little national importance. We all know that massive government spending can’t pull a country out of an economic depression, except for that one time it did.

Much of FDR’s New Deal was nothing more than thinly veiled pork spending, and the lasting effects of his political pork are as obvious as the effect left on my cholesterol after those four Baconators I had last week. Building parks and commissioning artwork during the Depression may not have balanced the budget, but it did provide thousands of unemployed people the ability to provide for their family, and in the long-run helped pull our country out of some serious trouble. Sure, we threw a war in there for good measure, but the government didn’t exactly save money by shipping boys to France.

This fear of government spending is nothing new. Nobody likes taxes, and when money’s tight, it’s easy to blame somebody else for spending too much of your hard-earned cash. But history tells us the one other time the bottom fell out and America plunged into a mega-depression, the proverbial Paxil was to let the federal government spend like a drunken sailor. Pork-barrel spending is a convenient scapegoat, but it isn’t the problem. The mere fact that anything involving pork — the king of meats, the breathing pi?ata — is seen as bad amazes me. I extend my sincerest apology to the Muslim community, but you guys are missing out. Spending isn’t inherently bad, but when our gut reaction is to stop circulating money through the average American and instead bail out flailing industries, we’ve engaged in poor spending. This economy can be saved, but it will require helping blue-collar, pork-eating, everyday people, and the sooner we realize it, the sooner we can all stop contemplating grad school.

Sean Kittridge ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in journalism.