One idea for economic growth: fight spam

I'm going to talk about spam. Yes, email. But first a little background:

To get out of this recession, one of the things we need to do is find worthwhile investments. It's only half a strategy for the government to try to stimulate the economy by spending money. If you don't do anything productive with that stimulus money you'll just end up creating inflation down the road. A conservative commentator suggested reducing income taxes to get us out of recession. My reply to that is the same. If there aren't any good investments, people who have income will just hold on to the extra money. No jobs will be created, no investments will be made. That's what's happening right now. Prices are falling. US treasury bills were recently auctioned at 0% interest!

(I'm not saying that the government should not spend until a good investment is identified. Obviously we have to help out families where, say, a job has been lost)

So, let's look for riches that can be unlocked. In history, the availability of new resources such as land, energy sources, technology, or trade opportunities were a source of economic growth. Where is the next big opportunity? I'm not sure, but here is a small one.

Cisco recently put out their 2008 Annual Security Report. They find that spam accounts for 200 billion messages a day, about 90% of all email messages. An enormous amount of time and infrastructure is wasted because of spam.

That's a store of value that can be unlocked, and can serve as a magnet for investment. I'd recommend fighting spam (e.g. figuring out how to implement a charge, say, of 0.1 cents per message) as a worthwhile opportunity to create economic growth. If we can put together a hundred of these ideas, perhaps we'd have a reasonable plan for spending our way out of this recession.

Now, the City of Kingston, Ontario spends $300 million a year on energy. That's $300 million that leaves the Kingston economy every year. Perhaps there's some value to be unlocked there...