When the Powerball was at 500 million, I was texting with my brother about it. He said if you won and took the lump sum, it would be $327.4 million. Based on articles of what other people took home after taxes, I deducted 46% and came up with a "take home" amount of $176.796 million.
Then I did what I often do, which is figure out how many jobs I could create at a base rate. I thought to myself: "I wouldn't even have to give over my whole fortune; I could just use half
of it and still make a huge difference."
So I started with $76 million, keeping $100 million for myself. From $76 million, I divided by $25,000 to see how many jobs I could create with that as a base salary. The result was 3,000. I did some more math to see what the take home pay would be for those jobs and it came out to $1500 a month.
The question I ask myself at that point is: is that a good salary? Can you pay rent or a mortgage and feed yourself and one other and pay for gas and utilities? I live in DC and while that's a decent salary, it might be hard to live on it with the way rents are, especially if you had to support other people.
So where might that be a good salary? In the South? Well, the South is too broad; what I need to look into is "ex-urban" areas, places outside a city where housing costs are lower and you can buy more for less money. My mind jumps to places like Mississippi because it's one of the poorest states in the country. It could just as easily be Nebraska or Kansas or Kentucky and Tennessee. Nevada and Wyoming probably have pretty good housing prices, considering a lot of those states are rural or undeveloped. Even parts of coastal states - Washington, Oregon, Massachusetts, Rhode Island - have sections that are lower income and lower priced.
So if I can find a location where housing prices are much lower (and a mortgage payment might be something like $400 or $500 month), my dollar will go a lot further.
But then I think to myself: does that mean I could pay an even lower salary? If rent is $300 a month, can they get by on less than $1500 without any real problems?
So I re-calculated using $20,000 as the salary and it came out to 3,800 jobs.
Now we get into the real problem with all of this: that's less than four thousand jobs and that's only one year. What difference is that going to make? How can that make any real change in the economy?
I tried to think about it in different ways. "Well, how big is a small town? How big of a sample size would you need to really make a difference in that town? 500? 200? 100? 50? If 50 people had a good salary and were paying for goods and services, could that perk up the entire town's economy?"
"What if I cut it in half and made it a two-year salary for 1500 or 1900 people? What if those people weren't all in one location but spread out throughout the country?" And then I started thinking about the work that mature foundations do and how they probably think about all these issues and study them and might give a grant to one or two people in a state, as long as the work they were doing were significant. I was thinking about it solely as a means of moving money around, a way of pumping money into a local economy, a way of stimulating the (or an) economy. I wasn't thinking about larger issues of 'what would the work be?' or 'what happens when the grant is over?' Those are important issues because otherwise shots of stimulus can end up being like using illicit drugs for emotional problems: they cover things up for a while, but when they're gone, the problems are still there and might even be compounded.
Even so, I think that I could create a program of meaningful work that employed a number of people in economically struggling areas that would help those areas economically and otherwise.
