How to fix the economy with shorter work weeks and longer vacations

For anyone who lives in the real world (rather than, say, on Wall Street), I suppose it isn't news that The Economy Is a Disaster: We Should Fix It. Nevertheless, over at truthout.com, Dean Baker tells us how we can do this:

There is an incredible complacency about this unemployment rate around Washington even though all the official projections show it remaining high years into the future. For example, the Congressional Budget Office projects that the unemployment rate will not fall below 7.0 percent until well into 2012 and will not return to normal levels until 2014. Perhaps, if more of the people in policymaking positions faced unemployment they would be more concerned about the problem.

The especially disturbing part of the story is that we do know how to get the unemployment rate down. In principle, we could create demand through another stimulus package, with the government directly or indirectly creating the demand needed to employ many of the 15 million unemployed workers. For political and superstitious reasons, a stimulus package large enough to substantially boost demand does not seem feasible.

However, we can also go the route that has proven successful at keeping unemployment down in Europe: work-sharing. The concept is very simple. Instead of paying workers unemployment benefits when they are not working, we pay companies to keep workers employed, but working shorter hours at pretty much the same pay.