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 econ

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.