SPAM Good for the Economy?

I just read something today that made me wonder. I was reading an article on how bad was and how much it was costing the U.S. $10 billion a year. I was surprised it was this much, but I could see it. It got me thinking what would happen if SPAM all of a sudden went away. What if someone figured out a sure fire way to stop all SPAM and instantly all of the SPAM was gone. Too good to be true I know but still interesting to think about.

What if this was possible what would happen. Well the first obvious benefit is that we will no longer have to sift thru our mail to find valid ones, they would all be valid. We would save time and we could be more productive. Nothing wrong with that. But what about the other side. What happends to all of those companies that base all of their revenue on fighting SPAM? They will no longer be needed. So they will have to create a new product or go out of business. So those employees would lose their job. The ISP's won't need to spend as much money on Bandwidth anymore since the SPAM is gone, so they can cut down on that, causing the revenue for the upstream ISP's to go down. So they might lose some jobs. That isn't so bad is it. So lets say 1000-2000 people lose their job, but we have no SPAM.. Still fine..

Now all of those companies that were spending money buying all of these SPAM guards have extra money to spend on other stuff.. What will they do, spend it on other stuff or save the money instead? My guess is they will save it instead..

What I am trying to get at is this, even though SPAM is bad, it is actually kind of good for the economy. It is pumping $10 billion a year into the economy. What would happen if that disappeared? I hate SPAM as much as the next guy, it is just something to think about.

Ken Cochrane
http://PopcornMonsters.com