Thursday, President Barack Obama signed a $38 billion piece of legislation aimed at creating more jobs. Optimistic estimates — according to The Associated Press — say the bill could potentially create 250,000 jobs by the end of the year. That comes out to $152,000 per job, if you’re willing to give the Democrats the benefit of the doubt — something I’m not typically inclined to do.

So, instead, I have come up with my own plan to facilitate job creation. It is simple and straightforward, involving three basic changes:

1. Cut back or eliminate welfare and unemployment benefits. We currently have a system that pays people to be poor and unemployed. If your goal is to get people to find jobs, common sense would dictate that you shouldn’t pay them to do the exact opposite.

To help illustrate this, I will give a hypothetical example. Say I want you to bake me cookies. That is my one goal in life. It seems to me, then, one very obvious thing I shouldn’t do in my attempt to accomplish this goal is to come to you and say, “I will pay you $10 as long as you don’t bake me any cookies.”

2. Cut back or eliminate the minimum wage. By forcing a company to pay at least a certain amount to employ someone, you take jobs away from anyone who isn’t able to generate at least that minimum amount in profit for the company. This is especially detrimental to lower-skilled workers, because it takes away their one advantage in the job market: a potential willingness to work for less.

For example, if I was willing to pay you $10 to bake me cookies, and you were willing to bake them for $10, but the government forced me to pay you $20, the cookies wouldn’t get baked, regardless of the fact that we were able to reach an agreeable price.

3. Cut back or eliminate the income tax. Income taxes increase the difference between the price being paid by the employer and the wage being received by the worker. This, like the minimum wage, can make a perfectly agreeable transaction between two parties not happen.

For example, say I was willing to pay you $10 to bake me cookies, but the government wanted 20 percent, so you only got $8. If you weren’t willing to make the cookies for $8, it wouldn’t happen, even though I was willing to pay $10.

And, the wonderful thing about the “Hasenmiller Job Creation Plan” is that the money you save from cutting welfare and unemployment benefits can be used to reduce taxes, so that, in the end, it doesn’t even cost the taxpayer. Plus, the increase in the number of jobs would lead to a larger tax base overall, so you might be able to cut taxes even more.

Economic recovery will only happen by increasing the amount of productivity. In other words, we have to make more stuff. Taking money from one group of people and giving it to another — like the recently passed job bill — doesn’t actually create jobs. It just moves them around, because, as I illustrated in part three, taxes reduce the number of jobs.

Economist and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution Thomas Sowell explains this saying, “ … government creates no wealth. Ignoring that plain and simple fact enables politicians to claim to be able to do all sorts of miraculous things that they cannot do, in fact. Without creating wealth, how can they create jobs? By taking wealth from others, whether by taxation, selling bonds or imposing mandates.

However it is done, transferring wealth is not creating wealth. When government uses transferred wealth to hire people, it is essentially transferring jobs from the private sector, not adding to the net number of jobs in the economy.”

Blake Hasenmiller is a senior in industrial engineering and economics from DeWitt.