The defense industrial complex is the go-to, but I got a kind of novel jobs program that doesn't get thrown around a lot: Private Health Insurance.

There's a straightforward transaction that occurs between healthcare provider and patient. But every...single...dollar that flows through the healthcare system is diverted through the massive private health insurance industry, which is essentially an artificial middleman skimming money off the top of the transaction between healthcare provider and patient. This provides employment for millions of accountants, and MBAs, and marketing people, and database engineers, and statisticians, and lobbyists, and etc.

It's the more touchy-feely cousin of the Defense Industrial Complex that must vacuum up money somewhere in the same order of magnitude.

In places with, relatively speaking, rich social services programs are essentially jobs programs. The budgets are caseloads are never reflective of need, and most families would be better served with getting a check than meeting with a burnt/checked out social worker. Often times programs run by the state are so taxed that they are entirely incapable of meeting the metrics required by law.

Those trillions would have been better spent expanding government programs in: land preservation, social services, healthcare, stem, and infrastructure maintenance and expansion. Instead it's just sloshing around the accounts of people who neither understand nor care about the plights of the average American.