5 Things to Know About the Stimulus-Era Job Market . . . The stimulus has Americans mostly confused. Here's what you need to know

Near the start of the nearly 1,100-page stimulus bill is its statement of purpose, and its first purpose is jobs, as in "to preserve and create jobs and promote economic recovery." With a price tag of nearly $800 billion, the ambitions for job creation and recovery over the next two years are huge. The president has signed it into law, but we still haven't heard a giant swoosh of relieved exhales from the 11.6 million Americans who are out of work and looking for jobs. Instead, when it comes to the stimulus package, confusion reigns.

On Yahoo Answers, a free public forum for posting questions and answers, hundreds of questions relate to the stimulus and its effect on the job market. One contributor asks: "Is there anything in the stimulus package that is not wasteful spending and will create jobs?" Now that the stimulus is beginning to be implemented, it's worth understanding just what this package is intended to do for employment. Here are five things to know about its intended effects on the job market over the next two years:

Every sector should grow: When economists Jared Bernstein and Christina Romer came up with the widely-used estimate of 3 to 4 million jobs that would be created or maintained by the stimulus, they used the rule of thumb that a 1 percent jump in GDP would correspond to a 1 million jobs jump in employment. Of the 3.7 million jobs estimated to be created or retained, you've probably heard the most about construction and healthcare jobs. But when jobs are created in those sectors, jobs are also created indirectly in other sectors. Businesses can spend, and workers can pay for things like hotel rooms, clothing and furniture. So, even the infrastructure portion of the bill should indirectly benefit ...