The Hole Economic Solution.

Many of you have written in and complimented me on my methods of solving the economic crisis. A last suggestion was that we all quit our jobs and become unemployed. There is more to it than that, and if you’re interested, go to my blog archives, and take a look. But here is my latest suggestion.

The best way to create jobs is to have the government hire two million people to dig holes and another two million people to fill the holes back up. This would create four million jobs immediately, and the government would print money to pay these four million people. The Fed wold pay these people $40,000 per year at a cost of $160 Billion, which is less money than the Feds gave AIG. In today’s economy, this whole activity could be subcontracted to the private sector or even subcontracted to a foreign corporation who would hire Americans to dig these holes and then other Americans to fill these holes up.

The more you think about this job creating strategy, the more you realize that it makes sense. We don’t really need the holes in the first place, so filling them up is a reasonable job creating alternative. Now the government could of course hire these people to do productive things like clean the streets, fill pot holes, cut the grass in the public sector, pick up cigarette butts in public parks or national recreation areas, but that would require endless legislation and disagreement about which parks should be handled first, which state should get most of the money and other complicated things of that nature. In my suggestion, no one really cares about where the holes are dug anyway or who fills them up. So it would take a lot less legislation for the hole digging and filling economic stimulus measure to take place.

Now one terrific by product of this is that these four million people who we’ve now put to work would pay taxes. Since about 30-40% of a person’s wages are paid back in taxes, the actual cost would be substantially less than the amount of money we’re actually paying these people. In addition, we would create a huge market for shovels, chiropractors, orthopedic surgeons, and even lawyers as litigation arises over someone getting hurt, misuse of a shovel, falling in a hole after they dug it, and a whole variety of other things. So the spin off benefits from this could be substantial in terms of creating additional jobs.

Using the Obama administration math for job creating, it’s reasonably easy to show that these four million jobs would create an additional four million jobs supporting these people from the private sector. If that’s the case, these additional four million people would pay taxes which would offset the amount of money that’s being spent by the federal government to hire the first four million people. Now if this keeps up long enough, it’s easy to see that the tax money generated from this whole process would exceed the amount of money that’s spent in hiring the four million people in the first place, making it a cash surplus method for generating jobs.

The other great beauty of this scenario is that the people who are out of work wouldn’t have to move. For example, if you lived in Hays, Kansas, and had no job, you simply could dig your hole in Hays, Kansas. Another person from Hays, Kansas could be hired to fill the hole. So there’s no geographic requirement as to where these people are. There would be no moving costs, no relocation costs, no personnel development costs and within reason, no training costs.

Now on the surface, this seems like a humorous, if not ludicrous, idea. But the more you think about it, the more you realize that this is a direct method of creating jobs. It’s not magic. These people would truly be working. They would have a job. They would get paid. They would spend their money creating more jobs. If there is a flaw in the system, it’s certainly dug in deep and certainly not obvious.