There recently was an article in the St. Petersburg Fl. Times. The Business Section asked readers for ideas on: “How Would You Fix the Economy?”
Dear Mr. President,
Please find below my suggestion for fixing America ’s economy. Instead of giving billions of dollars to companies that will squander the money on lavish parties and unearned bonuses, use the following plan. You can call it the “Patriotic Retirement Plan”:
There are about 40 million people over 50 in the work force. Pay them $1 million apiece severance for early retirement with the following stipulations:
1) They MUST retire. Forty million job openings – Unemployment fixed.
2) They MUST buy a new American CAR. Forty million cars ordered – Auto Industry fixed..
3) They MUST either buy a house or pay off their mortgage – Housing Crisis fixed.
It can’t get any easier than that!!
P.S. If more money is needed, have all members in Congress pay their taxes….
Mr. President, while you’re at it, make Congress retire on Social Security and Medicare. I’ll bet both programs would be fixed pronto!
If you think this would work, please forward to everyone you know. If not, please disregard.
Seems like a plan that would work doesn’t it? That is until you do the math. It’s $40,000,000,000,000.00, yes, 40 trillion dollars. That’s not every going to happen no matter how good this idea looks.
However, say that it did happen. What’s the average price of paying off a mortgage or buying a house. Just for kicks lets say it’s $150,000.00. That puts 6 trillion back into the economy. Probably at least 1 trillion of that collected in taxes from personal income and spending. Now remember, the old rule of thumb is each dollar spent turns over 6 times so that makes the 6 trillion spent on houses worth around $36,000,000,000,000 in economic help.
Now if everyone has to buy a new American Vehicle that’s going to be another big chunk of change. We’ll use $25,000.00 as the average cost, it’s probably going to be higher as these people have money to spend and want to buy something that’s going to last a long time. Thats, 100,000,000.00. That’s 100 Billion if my math is correct. Lol, I’m old, all the zeros run together. 
So that’s another 600 Billion added to the economy and probably another 150 Billion paid in taxes.
However we could get by if we just retire 20 million people. That cuts all costs in half but it also cuts everything else in half. Reality is we could do the whole works with just 10 million people and cut all costs by 75% and all benefits by the same amount. However we are now getting a lot closer to being doable.
10 Million mortgages paid off or houses sold, 10 Million job openings to be filled immediately and probably another 5 million jobs created by the infusion of cash into the economy. Plus 10 Million new cars bought from GMC, Ford and Chrysler. Yeah, yeah, I know Toyotas are made in this country. However Toyotas will forever be considered foreign cars. To bad for Toyota.
Now that we’ve gotten things down to a manageable level lets see how it works out.
10 Trillion to give 10 million people a million. That goes in the paid out column. 1.5 Trillion dollars spent on mortgages or houses with a 6 times turnover or the money makes it worth 9 Trillion bucks to the economy. The cars would equal 25 Billion and add 150 Billion to the economy. The economy would collect approx 2 Trillion in taxes, give or take a few billion.
Now we need to add in the 10 million people who got jobs because of this plan. Say each makes 600 bucks a week. 31,200.00 x 10 million. Man I’m tired of math, you figure it out. Anyway now we have 10 million people making 31,000.00 per year and paying taxes on it, plus this is added money to the economy because the 10 Million people who got the million apiece are now spending more than they used to.
Cutting it down to 10 million people makes it look like it just might work and people might just go for it. I don’t think 40 million people will work just because the numbers would scare the hell out of people.
