The End of Unemployment

Here's my simple plan.

Pay 12.5 million people $10 an hour to sit home all day and watch TV.

Pros

* It would bring the unemployment rate down to 0%.
* It would only cost 1/4th of a trillion dollars per year.
* It would use very little crude oil.

Cons

* It would not help us compete in the global economy.
* It would not lay the groundwork for future growth.
* Some current workers might choose to quit (unintended consequence).

The plan only uses $260 billion dollars per year (12.5 million x $10 per hour x 40 hours per week x 52 weeks per year). That would still leave us with $740 billion of the trillion dollar deficit to fund the cons (pun intended).

I'm not alone in thinking up new plans though. Tom Purcell has thought up an absolutely brilliant trillion dollar plan that puts my plan to shame. He's basing his plan entirely on unintended consequences and how we might game the system to make it work for us, instead of against us. Genius!

'Un-intention' key to solutions

It's unfortunate, but obvious, that President Obama and his team aren't sure how to unfreeze the credit markets. But, by applying the principle of "un-intention," it's suddenly obvious to me.

Obama needs to establish a new presidential task force whose mission is to further freeze credit markets. We'll give the group a $1 trillion budget to spend any way it sees fit to reduce economic output, increase unemployment, cause more bankruptcies and so on.

I'm confident the markets will thaw and the economy will boom inside of six months.

I highly encourage you to read the entire article. He really makes a great case. It is extremely difficult to argue with his sarcastic logic.

The bull market in sarcasm is really starting to squeeze me out. No matter how sarcastic my plans become, there's always someone else who can think up something even more sarcastic.

You know what really scares me though? I'd like to think that my sarcasm is at least decent. Decent may not be good enough in the future though. Just think what would happen if a billion Chinese start thinking up their own sarcastic plans. What if 0.1% of them use genius level sarcasm? That's a million! I'll be squeezed out entirely. There's absolutely no way I can compete with that.