A Modest Proposal

Pundits are pawing over the details of the Obama Administration's economic stimulus plan as they are unearthed, looking for newsy tidbits.

Yesterday, for instance, Republicans dug up a small handful of what, to them, smelled like pork — money for the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), for example. Apparently, for Republican lawmakers, art has its rewards as an investment that helps them preserve the bacon they bring home, but the artists themselves, it appears, aren't high on the list of those they want to keep off the unemployment rolls.

The pig sty aside, the Obama plan as a whole sounds OK to me. It's got short-term and long-term stimuli. I'd like it better if there were even more dollars for alternative energy in the mix, but it's a start. Certainly better than alt energy got the last few years.

But ... there is something missing. Something so obvious, I'm just baffled at the fact that no-one is talking about it. It would provide a significant economic stimulus, it would take a fairly big bite out of our global-warming and dependence-on-foreign-oil problems and, the best part, this program could be started tomorrow, and needn't add one cent to the real porker, our National Debt.

I have no idea, really, how many people spend their days working a computer and/or a telephone for a living, but I bet it's in the double-digit millions. A sizable majority of them work on PCs rather than mainframe computers, and most of those, these days, have, or could be issued, laptop computers. So, my proposal is simple: Mr. Obama should issue an executive order to employers: Send all of these laptop-users home and tell them to stay there.

I figure there are many millions of folks in this category, all capable of doing their jobs less than 50 ft from their bedrooms. What employee wouldn't spring for a high-speed Internet connection to reap that kind of windfall? And the smart employer could pick up the tab for it, because he/she is off the hook for a whole raft of expenses associated with such issues as long-term maternity leave, in-office child care and nursing rooms, and other accommodations they have to make (or soon will have to make) to maintain an office workforce. I bet there are thousands of employers who, for a well-dangled tax break, would be happy to comply. Eventually, companies with high percentages of stay-home workers could find smaller office spaces, as leases run out — downsizing the building rather than the workforce.

Yes, some people would take advantage of being at home, goofing off, etc. But hey, if the work falls off, employers could simply get someone else, selecting from the pool of 51 million job seekers experts say will be added to the unemployment rolls worldwide this year. There will soon be a large number of people, many of them grossly overqualified and desperate for work of any kind, standing in line for just about every job opening imaginable. I don't see goofing off as a serious problem for the foreseeable future, do you? It's much more likely that those stay-at-homers will be happy to work the extra hour they once devoted to the commute, increasing productivity without losing a second of their personal time, in order to ensure that they keep their jobs!

Imagine 20 million or more people NOT driving to work every day, NOT spending money on gas, NOT having accidents, NOT having to be late home to dinner. Imagine 20 million or more cars NOT on the road in rush hour. Figure the average commute is a half-hour, twice a day. Let's call it 25 miles, to be conservative. Let's figure 25 mpg as the average, between the gas guzzling pickups and SUVs, and the sedans and compacts, that sounds about right. So let's figure it's just one gallon of gas per day (very conservative). If 20 million people save just 1 gallon a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, that's more than 5 billion gallons a year. That's a lot of greenhouse gas NOT screwing up the ozone layer.

And at today's prices, (conservatively, $1.50 per gallon), that's $7.5 billion straight back into the pockets of taxpayers, (compensating them for the pay reductions and lack of bonuses this year, if they're lucky enough to stay employed) and it doesn't add one cent to the National Debt. And at $4.00 a gallon, a rate we'll no doubt be paying again very soon, the money put directly back into those taxpayers pockets balloons to $20 billion.

That's $20 billion going to the mortgage (to preclude foreclosures) the credit card (to buy down their debt), tuition (so their kids get those math/science degrees we say we need) and to help pay for hybrid or electric car they cannot, right now, afford to buy.

I think my figures are actually far too conservative. There is probably a much larger number of people who could work from home. And many of them use a whole lot more than one gallon of gas getting to work and back each day.

I suspect some Republicans won't like this idea, either. They'd think it was a worker's union plot or something. But in a day when you can reach the world, talk to anybody, face-to-face, and teleconference with a group of any size simply by logging in to a laptop, the fact that so many of us are compelled to drive to another location to do so is not only unnecessary but unproductive, disruptive, wasteful and bad for the environment, not to mention self-destructive and just plain stupid.