You could have them go break large rocks into smaller rocks if you have an ideological bent against people being unemployed but unless those rocks can be sold to somebody for more than what unemployment benefit is there's no incentive.
Edit: Agree with the comments below. Rather than being idle there's many ways society could harness the skills and manpower of the unemployed for socially value adding, but perhaps not financially profitable, ventures.
See the contradiction here?
We could put these people to work engaging in labor that is valuable, but not as valuable as the cost of their welfare. I.e. pay them $7.25/hour to do $5/hour worth of labor (net cost to society = $2.25/hour).
Yet we don't. Instead we pay them to play video games (net cost to society $7.25/hour).
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/news/scholar-profile/faculty-spotli...
In the Portland area we have a large park (many square miles) that's being over-run by English ivy, and that's not going to be fixed without a lot of people going out and pulling it up by hand. If the city were to pay a bunch of workers with nothing better to do minimum wage it might be a lot cheaper than paying a team of regular permanent employees, and it could address part of the unemployment (and possibly some of the homelessness) problem.
If you pay someone $7.25/h to do nothing, that might be considered an incentive payment to not do work that does net harm to society.
While it would always be better to pay the $7.25 for something that might benefit the economy less in absolute terms, there is no "zero" that can be used to calculate a "net" cost of social welfare. Playing video games is not plowing a large vehicle through a crowd of people, or mixing fertilizer with #2 fuel, or strapping tiny backpacks filled with thermite and moisture-sensitive primers to bats, or cooking meth, or cooking krokodil desomorphine, or turning tricks in the park bathroom, or pooping in the neighborhood swimming pool.
One person can be very destructive, or at least thousands of dollars worth of annoying, before anyone would bother stepping in to check them.
But lets take your claim as given, namely that some classes of people are so dangerous if we don't pay them they'll harm us. If I thought you were right, then I'd probably turn to the Brexiters and Trumpkins for a solution. Are you really claiming that the poor are basically just gangsters and terrorists?
I'd estimate at least 90% of people living under the poverty line would never choose to commit a violent crime or property crime if their survival needs were assured. Malum prohibitum crimes and regulatory infractions are another story. Having more money means you can smoke higher-quality marijuana, and usually with less police interference. Having more money means you can pay speeding and parking fines without spending any nights in the county jail.
"Poor people" are not just one big homogenous group. They have their righteous saints and their sleazy lowlifes, and everything in between, just like every other economic class. The former deserve society's help, whereas the latter can sometimes be bribed to behave better.
Welfare doesn't stop the terrorism that still happens in places that have welfare, because those terrorists aren't murderously mad about being poor. It certainly stops food riots, at least until the system collapses. The crime in the Chavez-unraveled Venezuela is quite different from terrorist activity in Europe.
Also, what's the point of making a quantifiable estimation (your "90%") if you have no actual data behind it? Just say you believe something based on observation; throwing out a nice round percentage to describe your belief, even as a figure of speech, does a disservice to real attempts to quantify phenomenon in a discussion.
Are my perceptions wrong? Do you have any evidence to support your claim?
Also, why can't vigorous policing - rather than paying tribute to violent criminals - also solve the problem?
http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
The fact is that the poor aren't working yet they are consuming.
http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publication...
This has been extremely destructive to the environment and has not done anything for the Japanese economy for the last 20 years.
It has been effective as a way of transferring taxpayer money to construction company presidents' pockets.
That's actually not the same thing. The parent comment's "have them go break large rocks into smaller rocks" carried the connotation of useless make-work. Your link describes a facet of concrete production, which is hardly useless.
Here is the key part of the article: "critics claim this is merely a reversion to the LDP’s traditional policy of pork-barrel spending on concrete structures"
Concrete itself has no inherent value. In Japan concrete is being used to ruin the natural environment as part of government make-work schemes, with very little discernible material benefit:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15320645-500-forum-la...
https://welovecarbondioxide.wordpress.com/2015/10/15/japans-...
http://joshnjaxnjapan.blogspot.com/2010/03/concrete-rivers-o...
Is the same true of the US? Are those anti-government republicans right? Will it be actively harmful if the US government does even one more thing?
I'd also like to replace as many (currently overpaid) government workers with welfare types as possible. Why pay $50k/year to a unionized govt janitor when you can just order someone currently on welfare to do the same job for no extra money?
When I say they are criminal organizations, I refer to organizations with rates of disability fraud as high as 97%.
http://mtaig.state.ny.us/assets/breaking_news/Newsday_7-23-1...
http://www.independentsentinel.com/a-must-read-federal-judge...
https://nypost.com/2014/08/06/nearly-all-lirr-workers-have-d...
What I'd suggest is that if they don't cause trouble, we don't send them to jail.