There are easier ways. I'll write a poem and sell it to you for $50 trillion and you draw a picture and I'll buy it for $50 trillion from you. We could get this done today and bump GDP by $100 trillion.
> I'll write a poem and sell it to you for $50 trillion and you draw a picture and I'll buy it for $50 trillion from you. We could get this done today and bump GDP by $100 trillion
Nominally, yes. Real, no. (In practice, given the barter resemblance of the trade, there would be no impact.)
Because money paid to the government contractor results in a person (persons?) getting paid along the way and then a large part of that flows into the real economy via consumption / spending.
In your $50 trillion poem example, no money can possibly flow into the real economy because you simply do not have $50 trillion to pay anyone - you're just describing a wash trade of a worthless $50 trillion IOU note not unlike a NFT or crypto memecoin. Best case is that the poem is worth something non-negative.
I hear the standard practice is to have the IP of the poem owned by a foreign entity(Ireland is pretty popular) and then for the US entity to pay a royalty of $50 trillion to the foreign entity so that the net revenue in the US is zero.
I believe it has it's own name - The double Irish.
>Economists at the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis estimate GDP using thousands of data points gathered by other federal agencies and some private data collectors.
I presume these economists would ignore outliers such as that example, especially ones that would result in unrealistic sales tax or other tax liabilities.
You might not agree that a blank canvas is a $100k "art piece", but assuming both parties are sincere, what's the issue? It's not really any different than some luxury brand selling a $50 (being really generous here) t-shirt for $500.
