Eric Schmidt stole this story from Milton Friedman.

I'll restrain myself from any commentary on what sort of person that shows him to be, other than that implied in this sentence.

I didn't include a source because there probably isn't one. But he def told this story. I was there in person at a google off-site keynote

It certainly didn't originate with Schmidt, but according to this, it probably didn't originate with Friedman either:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/

Though he's best known for it.

It's kind of depressing seeing how much even leaders just blatantly copy each other quotes.

Large steel bridge construction involves much hand labor. Here's a big job in China.[1] If you're not seeing the foundation work or crane work, it may look like it's all hand labor. Large bridges are custom-designed prefabs. Somewhere else, there's a factory making the parts.

[1] https://youtu.be/kJ1ciG7IjKA

If it's a government project, the employment may actually be the real goal, less so than the bridge.

See also: countries that maintain a military big enough to fight off an attack from two hostile star systems at once, never mind two hostile countries.

It's the ultimate jobs program.

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.