Posted on 04/29/2014 12:47:26 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The federal government can easily afford a job guarantee program, becoming our employer of last resort.
Involuntary unemployment is barbaric. In the wealthiest country in history, almost 30 million people wish they had full-time work. But, as always, there aren’t enough jobs. And because economic security requires decent work, it’s unsurprising that 50 million people are poverty-stricken and 16 million children are hungry.
This is a disgrace and an economic error: the US government can easily afford a Job guarantee (JG) program, becoming our employer of last resort.
A right to a job may sound outlandish, but it’s common sense. You need dollars to eat, and unless you steal the dollars, you generally have to earn them. If the government wants to protect property with cops, courts, and prisons, issue a single, common currency, and tax and fine us in it, it should at least guarantee we can work for our own dollars. Politicians ramble about equality of opportunity and the dignity of work, but to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, we need boots. And lest our boots stomp each other’s necks in senseless competition for too few jobs, we need a job guarantee.
A job guarantee isn’t that radical. Thomas Paine proposed one in 1791. In 1944, FDR included the right to a living wage job in his Second Bill of Rights and his Republican opponent promised state-ensured employment. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights enshrined the right to work and philosophers Rawls and Dewey advocated government provide enough work. LBJ deliberated a JG and Martin Luther King Jr., demanded one.
In 1977, the Senate proposed legislation guaranteeing employment, allowing residents to sue the US government should it fail to provide it. The litigation provision was cut, but the final Humphrey-Hawkins Act authorizes Uncle Sam to “create a reservoir of public employment.” According to legal scholar Cass Sunstein, in 1990, an overwhelming 86 percent of respondents expressing an opinion wanted that reservoir. This January, the JG still polled high at 47 percent—even higher among people of color—despite its relative unfamiliarity.
Would a job guarantee just create dismal make-work? No. Even ultraconservative idol Bill Buckley admitted there’s always something to be accomplished. New Deal employees built dams, bridges, roads and parks. Similar efforts have succeeded in Sweden and South Africa. Congressman Conyers has proposed creating enough public works for full employment, targeting decaying, unsustainable infrastructure.
But JG employees needn’t construct trains or solar panels. Locally administered, non-capital-intensive programs have thrived in Argentina and India. Economist Pavlina Tcherneva has extensively researched Argentina’s decentralized strategy, which emphasized childcare, eldercare and community gardening, empowered women in particular and swiftly slashed extreme poverty by 25 percent. A bottom-up JG could bolster small businesses and nonprofits, and co-ops could apply for JG grants to pay wages. Neighborhoods wouldn’t have to bankroll Walmart or McDonald’s.
It may sound expensive, but a JG would pay for itself. “Deficit owls” argue we can afford much more federal spending of this type. Remember, current anti-poverty programs like unemployment insurance pay people not to work, destroying human capital, sales, output, and the tax base. Estimated spending for a national infrastructure JG is $750 billion; bottom-up models, cheaper. JG outlays would replace or reduce the costs of much current anti-poverty spending (roughly $746 billion), with exponential benefits. The Treasury should finance a JG, but national, state or local agencies could administer it.
As conservatives Kevin Hassett and Peter Ferrara have argued, Obama-style stimulus is sloppy. Unlike a JG, it doesn’t target households directly. Elegantly, JG spending is inherently constrained; a JG would implement a universal guaranteed wage—effectively the new minimum—and employees could join or leave in response to private sector booms and busts.
Would jobs for all skyrocket wages and prices, spurring inflation? Such unfounded belief holds the jobless hostage to hysteria. The JG is an inflation stabilizer, easily compatible with additional precautions. Because non-JG employees could quit for a JG job, their bargaining power would increase. By the same token, businesses could hire JG-trained employees, so employers’ negotiating power would increase as well. Thus, wages wouldn’t spiral. Furthermore, guaranteed employment for low-income individuals would discipline the prices of goods and services they typically buy.
Aside from the economic benefits, we deserve to participate in society as both producers and consumers. Participation is a premise for both collective enterprise and the self-determination Americans cherish. Even the best education and training programs cannot assure full employment. We need to change the economy, not people.
On that note, a JG is key to the movement for further reforms. It’s a complementary framework for the living wage campaign. It offers strikers security. It relieves parasitic student debt. JG wages could even be deposited into postal banks.
A JG would offer a hand-up from the isolation and stagnation often accompanying joblessness. As economists Sandy Darity and Darrick Hamilton argue, it would also combat racist hiring discrimination, anti-immigrant sentiment and crime.
Some critics don’t want dignified living to depend on wages, preferring an income guarantee. I’m sympathetic, but people want checks and good jobs. Moreover, unemployment, like disenfranchisement, feeds the fat cats. Paying people to sit on the sidelines, without offering an option to participate, can finance apathy.
To paraphrase MLK, call a JG what you want. I call it common sense. And I call it justice.
Raúl Carrillo '15 is a J.D. student at Columbia Law School. He earned a B.A. in Social Studies at Harvard College, where he wrote a column on American politics for The Harvard Crimson. He subsequently worked as a staffer for California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris, assisting with the 2012 multi-state mortgage fraud settlement. In the summer of 2013, he interned at the Securities and Exchange Commission in New York City.
The federal government can easily afford a job guarantee program …Of course, because money that is printed always has value no matter what.
According to legal scholar Cass Sunstein …That’s some nuclear stupid, right there.
They don't have to now. People freely choose to go to these outlets - because they provide goods at excellent prices and/or at excellent speed.
If Government is given monopoly power over the means of production you get a totalitarian state. You get Nazi Germany. You get the USSR. You get Mao's China.
Carillo wants this because he is a budding fascist.
Sure it does. Grab a shovel, Raul.
*facepalm*
I’m thinking if we could pay people to actually work, it would be cheaper and more humane than the way our social safety is currently administered.
We have to ask ourselves if government dependency is a good thing and if not how to begin changing it.
Another entitlement program is not the answer.
he doesn’t realize that the people who he most would align with wouldn’t even work if given a job, and would never vote for a politician who supported it.
I actually agree with the guy
If people want to work, yhey shoudl be able to work
Cass is a communist pig
And they could work, if the government would just get out of the way. As in the Keystone Pipeline, for instance.
People who live off the Gov should not be allowed to vote. Including SS and Gov workers, with the exception of land owners.
A Job Guarantee is justice?
Scary, perverted language.
I completely agree with you.
That's some real deep, deep thought there, Raul.
It's the kind of simplistic drivel that socialists the world over cling to - having 'no dollars' forces you to steal to get them, or with GOVERNMENT giving you a job you don't have to steal (we won't talk about how government STEALS the dollars to give to you for a job that has no merit).
But even giving the concession in this quote you might have to 'earn' them, you immediately launch off to JOBS GUARANTEE, or 'JG' you constantly cite thereafter as the panacea for every ill that besets us. Yes, JOBS earn you money. However the kind of jobs you're thinking of are really nothing more than sinecures - government jobs, more specifically government-funded jobs.
Future lawyers like Carrillo are what this country is producing in its liberal institutions. They are being trained to trample our rights; subvert our laws, misuse them and create new ones in which there is no Constitutional basis.
Raul also makes the idiotic argument that starts “In the richest country in the world....” Hey progressives, guess what? There are things even the richest country in the world cannot afford. Being richest is not the same as having infinite resources.
This idea of government as employer of last resort has gotten traction over the last year or so in mainstream media, as if it has never been tried before and is elegantly simple. Read a history books some time, will ya!
We ought to put our focus back on the Lord here.
The Lord made, and makes, astounding promises. Believing them opens the door for blessings.
I spent a brief period in the belly of the beast. It was frustrating. I bucked the system so hard to try to get something done, even within the context of the pencil pushing, that I got kicked out of the “job.”
Anyhow, even “make work” is better than nothing when it is something good and useful that is made. But the free market is the stellar place for work to occur, because something that isn’t good and useful won’t be rewarded for long. America used to be prized for its opportunity and now the same America is despised.
For some strange reason, the phrase “Arbeit Macht Frei” immediately comes to mind.
And also how did it get to be richest. The liberals speak as though it was by “robbing the poor.” Hello. Who has the richest poor in he world?
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