Holy crap! Was I ever wrong.

Checking IMDB, it seems that this film has been made at least 7 times, most of them called Brewster’s Millions (with the “s” at the end [guess they should have used an apostrophe to make it clear!]). Interestingly, it was done once with a woman, twice with a Brit. The female version was Miss Brewster’s Millions, still with the “s”, and once, for no apparent reason, they changed the name to Three on a Spree!, but with exactly the same plot and a main character named . . . Michael Brewster. The amount of money to be spent fluctuates over the years, and minor details change (4 of the 7 leads are named “Monty” Brewster, but the spelling keeps changing – Richard Pryor, for some reason, is “Montgomery”). In early versions, the character is not only required to spend the money but also remain unmarried; by the last version, that apparently didn’t seem like a problem that would create a major conflict, so it was dropped. Otherwise, the basic plot is always the same. In Pryor’s version, they jumped the amount to be spent to $30 million, way beyond what any other version had used; coming just two years before Wall Street, I guess just $1M or $2M didn’t seem like anything anymore.

Also interesting, it was remade every 5-10 years throughout the Depression – 1914, 1921 (with Fatty Arbuckle as the title character), 1926 (female lead), 1935 (first Brit version), and 1945 – then only twice (including the renamed version) in the next 40 years. It seems that high-society hijinks were more popular during hard times. (Lots of other high-society movies were made between the wars as well.) I guess that means we’re in for another version soon – presumably starring hedge-fund executives as the beleagured poor rich men.

Brewster’s Millions, word. Except, instead of renting out Yankee Stadium, today it would cost $10,000 for a set of four of the highest priced seats for an individual regular season game. True story.

Interesting segue, Richard Pryor would quite likely have attended a 450K crack party.

(Yes, my young ass is aware that the Pryor version was not the original Brewster’s Millions)

Thanks for another vivid illustration of why this constitutes Libertarian Problem Solving.

We could turn the entire country into a massive remake of “Brewster’s Million”, where the prize, if you win, is that you don’t go to jail!

And, of course, Cringely’s plan also makes the assumption that most or all of the offenders would simply “pay up” rather than take their chances with the enforcement officers, tie things up in court for years, etc. It truly is an example of libertarian problem solving, because it sounds great at first blush, but stops making any sense at all the moment you stop and think about it for more than two or three seconds.

Of course, were it not for the giant deficits the new administration is inheriting, this would truly be an historic opportunity. There are all sorts of infrastructure projects that have been neglected for three decades (e.g., highway bridges, rail infrastructure, New Orleans levees, port of New Orleans modernization, etc.), and that lend themselves to the type of spending that’s needed. And the best part is, the benefit of completing those projects will extend well beyond the immediate crisis. They will pay for themselves many times over in the economic opportunities and growth that they enable. (In fact, allowing them to deteriorate over the last few decades was a classic example of “penny wise, pound foolish” thinking — which, again, libertarians and economic conservatives are famous for.)

I saw one figure showing that for every dollar the federal government spends on such projects, you actually grow the GDP by $1.40. In the private sector, a 40% ROI would be pretty hard to turn down. The incoming Obama administration puts the figure at $1.57, but I think that’s overly optimistic. Although they may be counting on a natural correction from the current slump accounting for some of that figure.

But Cringley’s premise is, as he says explicitly, that it doesn’t matter what the money is spent on. And, to some extent, it doesn’t. Though it would obviously be better to target the primary purchases more intelligently, the whole idea behind Keynesian money-velocity theory is that the important thing is to get money moving in the economy again, no matter how. Whatever you spend your dough on, no matter how stupid or trivial, the person you pay with it will then spend it on something else, and so on. Because they all have different needs and desires, eventually every part of the economy gets stimulated. (If every one in the country were simply buying and selling Beanie Babies back and forth, obviously it wouldn’t help. But they won’t be – and can’t be. Even the Beanie Baby kings have to buy food, pay rent, and so forth, and eventually they’ll want to buy other stuff as well.) So, yeah, a literal legal mandate to “buy something!” or face jail seems kind of odd, but it’s no different, really, from the classic expedients of giving cash stimulus (like the early tax rebates that Bush kept using to buy votes) or providing jobs – even make-work jobs – in order to create salaries. Under traditional spending-stimulus plans, the government doesn’t tell you what to buy with your new salary or cash bonus – they just shovel money into the economy and let things sort themselves out.

From that perspective, Cringely’s plan isn’t crazy, or all that different from traditional stimulus plans. And it addresses the problems that are arising from the industry bailouts: big businesses came to the government crying for handouts, and the government gave them massive amounts of money, both to prevent bankruptcies and mass layoffs, and to stimulate lending and spending. Instead, the auto companies lobbied to leverage their bailout legislation to cut union wages by Congressional fiat – both bad economics (cutting workers’ spending power while you’re trying to stimulate the economy to stop a depression is insanely stupid) and bad faith, and the financial companies hoarded their money gift, refusing to lend while granting themselves huge bonuses. Cringely’s plan closes the loophole whereby beneficiaries get taxpayer money and then refuse to put it into the economy, by making it a crime not to spend! Crude, but then he’s reacting to business executives who simply don’t respond to appeals for decency, public spirt, or living up to their own agreements.

As for $1.5 trillion in spending, that amounts to $5,000 per person across the whole population, even if only individual taxpayers are considered. That seems easily doable (I could certainly find a way to spend 5 large, if I had it). The problem arises when you figure that only a fraction of adults are responsible for the tax mess; thus, their individual spending burdens would be, in some cases, quite large, and that gets back to the question whether they actually have the money to do what is demanded. But as for spending it if they do have it, that hardly seems to be a problem. For many of them, that’s how they got into this mess in the first place.

There are other problems with the plan. (A huge one is fairness: basically, tax evaders are being given an amnesty on the condition that they go out and materially improve their personal living conditions using what is nominally public money. Somewhat depressing for those who paid their taxes and therefore didn’t have the money to go on a patriotic shopping spree.) But, I say again, it’s not totally crazy in its basic financial aspects, even if it turns out to be (a) unworkable, (b) unpopular, or (c) politically unthinkable.

And, if I may be unduly serious for a while of course it wouldn’t actually work. First of all, it assumes that everyone who jilted the government out of tax revenue still has at least 50% of that money just laying around as readily-accessible, disposable income. Second, even if they have it, what are they going to spend it on? That question’s left unanswered, but I’d venture to say it’s a pretty important piece of the puzzle! You’d be hard pressed to buy $1.5 trillion worth of “stuff.”