The Glade 4.0

Actually spending is the only way to create jobs... whether it's government spending or corporate spending. You pay people wages, thus spending money.

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"The map is not the territory."

No. Were that true, we could print a bunch of money and just mail out checks to everyone and we'd all haev jobs. We could all have jobs that pay millions of dollars.

Think about what a job actually represents.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

What you want to say is spending can't create jobs in the long term. It can certainly create jobs in the short term.

"Here's money if you go and do this."

That's what a job is. Spending created it. The job might or might not last in the long term.

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"The map is not the territory."

No, it doesn't create jobs at all. So no, it's not what I want to say.

Increased productive capacity, new ventures providing new services, or such actions create jobs. Spending money to pay the salaries of employees needed for such actions is part of that process. It is not the means, nor the ends, it's just a byproduct. It is purchasing labor.

You could buy someone's time to stand around, but the cost comes at decrease capacity elsewhere, through underutilization of resources or depletion of accumulated capital.

If I build a house, I probably will do some framing. That means I will likely drive nails into 2x4's. But driving nails into 2x4's is not building a house.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Except that job must perform a function. Sure, it might be a job in a semantic or colluqial sense, but it's not service that anyone would purchase. It doesn't serve any use to the discussion. You may have some validity in the same sense there is no delineation between "consumption" and "investment". Afterall, what one person might call an investment (a garbage can), another might call it consumer consumption.

But like I said previously, were we to use your definition of job, we might as well just print tons of money and everyone can sit around and have an easy "job" and get paid for it, paid handsomely at that.

The key to distinguishing which jobs should and should not be considered jobs is the function of the market.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

If simply spending money created jobs then people on Welfare would be considered employed.

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The purpose the unemployment rate was tracked to show how productive our nation was as jobs meant production. This is no longer the case so the focus is only on someone getting a paycheck - in this view welfare is a job.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I expect this to be a change slipped into a bill somewhere. Think of the outstanding job recovery we'd have!

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades