How about putting back together giant structures that are falling apart? Our infrastructure is rotting away --- that Minneapolis bridge collapse in 2007 was a bit of a wake-up call. There's no shortage of stuff in the United States that needs to get fixed.

I agree, but Charles Dickens made that politically impossible. "Are there no workhouses?" Etc.

"John Maynard Keynes did suggest welfare should be employing people to do things, even pointless things like building giant structures and them demolishing them again."

In his lifetime though we already did this. If you were too poor to get by then you could go live at the town farm where you would receive public assistance in exchange for working.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poorhouse

You would think that all a government has to do is supply assistance to trades people to hire/train apprentices. I had a cousin go into the Navy just to learn a trade which upset me, as in previous decades he could have learnt the same trade by entering an apprenticeship. I belive some countries like Austria still support these programs, I have friends whose teenage boys left school early but were able to enter a subsidised apprenticeship rather than drop out and become unemployable.

I wouldn't have them do utterly useless jobs like this, but rather government jobs that need doing but don't take years of training. There will always be some churn of unemployment anyway, we should take advantage of it. Why hire someone to do this kind of job when we have people literally sitting around looking for something to do?

Of course to balance this you would need to raise unemployment benefit and get rid of this shameful "food stamp" concept. Everyone on unemployment gets a fair living wage, they just have to work part time in some government job with bursts to full time when needed (e.g. holidays, etc.).

Hmm interesting; I vaguely remember that, but had forgotten about the concept and term. Looks like it's still a fairly active idea being debated by economists, though not so much by politicians: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22employer+of+last+reso...

There is a term for that, in Czech: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hladov%C3%A1_ze%C4%8F

If he truly said that, I am even less inclined than before to see the merit of his theories. Not that I know them in detail, but this makes me not want to know them.

If people are still able and looking for jobs, their time is better spent looking for jobs than doing pointless tasks. This can be a real problem - writing applications (if that is your approach) takes a lot of time, and if you do 14 hours of taxi driving per day, there is less time for finding that job that would suit you better.

Then there are the people on welfare who are really sick or disabled - why should they have to build giant structures, and how?

Lastly there might be people exploiting the system, but I suspect they are not that many. At least were I live, being on welfare is actually work, anyway, because you have to wade through tons of bureaucracy to get it and stay on it.