Let's start with what would happen if we spent the $800 billion buying massages for everyone in the country! Let's assume that the price of an hour long massage is $100. So that would be 8 Billion Massages! If we presume that a busy day for a massage therapist would be six massages a day, five days a week (so each provider is giving 30 massages a week) and will take two weeks of vacation a year, that's 1500 massages a year. At that rate, we could keep 5,333,333 massage therapists fully employed for a year!
We'd be one relaxed, and much healthier country at the end of it.
Of course, it's not clear that there are that many practicing massage therapists in the country!
Another way to consider the size of the stimulus is to consider another group of service providers. If we take the entire Personal Care Services (doesn't include massage, but rather day spas / salons, hair stylists, nails, weight loss / diet centers) category from the 2002 Census Data, which at the time employed a total of 535,000 people, with total revenues of only $20 billion. Given the current stimulus being considered, we could keep this entire segment, fully employed at 2002 levels for 40 years.
Let's say that again.
40 Years!
That's a lot of personal care!
I do hope that the stimulus finds it way to the service providers. I personally think that we could do worse than to take a small portion of the stimulus and send everyone in the country vouchers for a massage, day spa treatment, or some other service that is offered by one of millions of personal service providers in the country. It would at least be clearly going directly to employing people who likely need the business!