A Plan To Rescue the Economy

Saturday, April 1, 2017

As politicians bicker and do nothing, the country continues its slide into economic uncertainty. For this reason, I have decided to step in and solve all of the country's economic problems once and for all. It was more than two years ago that I detailed my plan to save the nation more than 220 billion dollars over ten years.

Today, on April 1st, I am announcing my foolproof plan to double - perhaps even triple - the GDP of this country without increasing government spending, meddling with interest rates, or making any convoluted tax modifications. Best of all, no economic hardship will be felt by any citizen.

First, let's review what GDP is. We all hear the term, but few can actually define it. Most people in the know think that it's a measure of all the goods and services sold in a country. That's actually an oversimplification. GDP also includes the imputed values of products that are never sold. Did you paint your house recently? Congratulations! You've effectively raised the GDP by increasing the imputed value of your house. If you wanted to rent or sell it, your new paint job would likely allow you to charge a higher price, but (and here's the important part) you don't actually have to rent or sell it for the GDP to go up.

We can use this fact to do some amazing things for the economy.

Having been sandwiched between a few of the more corpulent citizens on the local mass transit system, I began to perform a bit of research on the wonders of liposuction.

Liposuction costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000 in the US and, as far as I can tell, removes approximately five pounds of actual fat from one's body. Some back-of-the-envelope math reveals that every pound removed via liposuction yields a $1,000 increase in GDP.

Let's step back a bit and look at a precursor to fat - donuts. A dozen peanut donuts from Dunkin Donuts contain a whopping 5,400 calories (enough to add 1.5 pounds of fat to a human body), all for a mere $7.49!

So, while some folks are paying $1,000 per pound of fat removed, others are paying $5 per pound of fat added. Using the logic of imputed value, it follows that every dozen donuts that aren't purchased results in a $1,005 addition to the GDP!

The current per capita GDP in this country is roughly $57,000 per person. To double that, we'd merely need to convince every man, woman and child in the US (all 325 million of them) to not purchase a dozen peanut donuts just once each week. Want to triple the GDP? We could simply convince them to not buy a dozen twice a week. Here's the magic of the solution: there's literally no theoretical limit to the plan, because the donuts are not being bought. As an added bonus, the money not being spent can be used elsewhere in the economy.

It's a no-lose situation and Americans owe it to themselves to put this plan into action! Listen up Washington. We can put our petty political squabbles aside and truly make America great again.