Naive is pretty much what I thought. The organization he describes is called a 'bank' - the government could just tell banks they will guarantee loans properly

Naive is pretty much what I thought. The organization he describes is called a 'bank' - the government could just tell banks they will guarantee loans properly underwritten based on X criteria that correlate to number of new jobs created. Starts to sound awfully like Fannie and Freddie, which made sense when there was no national banking or mortgage market, but tens of thousands of banks with no access to capital. But later they become pure rent-seeking bureaucracies monetizing an implicit Federal guarantee doing nothing a national bank wouldn't do. (not blaming Fannie/Freddie for the crisis although they didn't help matters, and based on bank behavior banks arguably would have done an even worse job). Could be creating a monster that never goes away and distorts the market. Cuban's proposal is also paralleling oil policy in the 70s - deregulate 'new' oil and put a 'windfall profits tax' on already discovered oil. In theory it promoted drilling - in fact it also promoted game-playing to launder 'old' oil into 'new' oil. Similarly, this would be limited to employers who can navigate the paperwork, and it would make economic sense to use this for projects they would have done anyway or somehow laundering existing jobs into 'new' jobs by transferring work to new entities. Good idea to study why people aren't hiring and provide appropriate incentives to reduce the costs and risks of hiring. The payroll tax holiday was a good idea to reduce cost of employees; extra deductions for training programs to increase productivity, maybe tax credits for hiring long-term unemployed. The more broad-based and the less paperwork the better. I'm not sure the reason companies aren't hiring is related to access to credit. There are labor economists who spend their lives on these problems, Cuban should probably talk to some of them, they might have a lot of ideas, some of them might even be politically feasible, and make sense to a business guy like Cuban who can get support for them.