The website asks me to login so I cannot really read the article.
But, the "fake jobs saves economy" idea is what Keynes theories are all about.
Depending on the country and the place it is more or less extreme but it is present pretty much everywhere nowadays.
The very famous passage:
"If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing."
Book 3, Chapter 10, Section 6 pg.129 "The General Theory.."
So essentially bury money and let people recover it for the sake of the economy...
What I found really funny is that simply helping the poor is bad, inventing stupid jobs is fine. Even if it is pretty much the same. In either case, it is another proof of how capitalism is not working, but society tries to "patch it up" in stupid ways.