"The only jobs that are sustainable are the jobs that produce something that other people actually want."
This is exactly it. You can not stimulate an economy simply by pushing up production on the supply side.
Mark Cuban's idea seems appealing on the surface, but he makes a serious assumption. He implicitly assumes a positive net benefit after you give these companies money and they create jobs with this money.
Look, if you transfer money from the government to the companies to the people then that is just a transfer payment. Moving money around like that does not create wealth within a country, and that is what we need right now. We need to spend money on things that generate positive net present value, and we need to curtail spending money on things that do not meet this criteria.
In order for Mark Cuban's idea to work, all of these companies must be employing the additional labor towards activities that are economically profitable. Here's a quick thought exercise. What is the likelihood of a company being engaged in economically profitable activities given that it is taking advantage of this program? (It is reasonable to assume that a company with a healthy balance sheet and a healthy income would not want to deal with government bureaucracy willingly.)
Also, as a side note, the following quote from the blog post is a bit inaccurate:
"(Stunningly, bailouts excluded)."
That the bank bailouts were repaid so handily owes very little to the bailouts themselves. Thanks to extraordinary measures taken by the Federal Reserve, the banks were able to borrow money at an interest rate of virtually nothing and then use this money to purchase U.S. bonds - effectively lending it back to the U.S. government. In addition to this, the Federal Reserve also took the unusual step of dramatically expanding its balance sheet (removing toxic liabilities from the banks themselves). That was the real bailout, and it was much larger than the pithy amounts that you saw reported by the administration.
To get a sense of the scale and size of the real bailout, please take a look at this graph:
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/fed-balance-she...
Edit: Also, I forgot to mention one more thing. The current negative rates on U.S. debt would almost certainly change if we began to issue substantially more of it. As Europe is rapidly learning, the debt market is far from a static environment.