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.
Sounds like an excuse for the work/concentration camps.
Actually, I do somewhat agree with the guy.
Anyone who gets welfare should be required to work for it. Pick up trash, clear out vacant lots, maintain parks, etc. Maybe if the welfare weren’t just handed out for doing nothing, they’d have a bit of incentive to make themselves eligible for real jobs and actually improve their lives for a change.
So, out of the hundreds of millions of people that have lived in the U.S. these are five that got it right, right?
Pick up trash, clear out vacant lots, maintain parks, etc....And the NLRB or somebody would be on you like a ton of bricks for taking jobs away from AFSCME,UAW or some union. Of course WE know they aren’t doing it in the first place but Courts have upheld the as they COULD do this work.
One would think this not knowing government in its usual modus operandi. It's true there might be 'something good and useful' produced, but how good is it if the money it took to get there was stolen from someone who produced that money on their own - provided good and useful value for it - and then had it taken from them. How much 'good and useful' stuff could they have done with it had they not had it taken from them.
The problem with these government funded jobs is the massive wasteful administrative bureaucracy it takes to oversee the disbursement of the booty. Couple that with the outright graft and corruption often associated with it and you have nothing but a few dollars thrown around some blighted urban area that doesn't even amount to hardly anything.
Where is charity in this picture? Private church/religious charity used to be stellar in America, then Caesar wheedled the church charities into letting his “efficiency” take their place. Some efficiency, it is a skim and scam job today.
This is why I say better than nothing. Even better is taking the strangle holds off of the private market and letting it do what private markets generally do. Case in point is what happened to GM and Chrysler. They should have died and their pieces auctioned. By being basket cases, they offer less value to the world than they would as totally private affairs — and somebody would have bought them and made something out of them.
“The US government can easily afford a Job guarantee (JG) program, becoming our employer of last resort.”
“Easily afford?” What a blithering idiot. The US Government is deeply in debt. It can no more afford some new utopian entitlement than a college student with four credit cards maxed out and 50K in loans can afford to take his buddies out for a gourmet meal with drinks.
Bingo. It would quickly devolve into something like the “Summer Jobs” program did—pay people just for showing up somewhere (for an hour to two a day) and wearing a t-shirt. Trying to make the underclass do actual hard labor would be labeled “racist” in no time. Can’t have that.
Agreed.
I’m not an economist, but common sense tells me this.....
pencil pushing, paper shuffling, cleaning, building roads, etc. are all essential jobs, not these kind of jobs do not PRODUCE anything. A strong economy cannot be based on only service type jobs. There must also be production of goods to be sold for a profit. Our government (and the unions) now makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the producer businesses to make a profit. And it is producer industry that created good-wage-paying jobs for masses of blue collar workers in the past.
“People who live off the Gov should not be allowed to vote.”
Absolutely, because if you rob Peter to pay Paul you will ALWAYS have the support of Paul. Here in NJ that has had disastrous consequences, as taxpayers (corporate and individual) flee the tax burdens imposed by our government workers and unassimilated gibsmedats.
Saw on the news last night that tax revenue projections were missed by $750 million; we need to get back into the layoff mode we had for gubmint workers a few years ago...
“The federal government can easily afford a job guarantee program …”
“Of course, because money that is printed always has value no matter what.”
Actually, they are just doling out wages with no return at all right now; if they can afford to do that, they can afford to make the recipients get off their asses and do something...
No one has a RIGHT for a job. They have to EARN the job.
The problem we have here in the United States is that the ever increasing “Jack booted thug” (the government) has made unemployment by “feeding the animals” and choking free enterprise to death by regulations, taxes and laws.
Get the government out of business and quit feeding the animals and everyone will be better off. Those with ambition and work ethic will thrive while the animals that once sat on their butts and got fed will be forced to “forage” for their food and shelter....and that means they have to get off their asses and actually WORK.
This guy’s got his head so far up his @$$ that he’s hallucinating from lack of oxygen.
Another college indoctrinated moron.
Yes, what we need here is another government directed, Soviet style “busy work” economy.
Knowing the government, they would all be unionized.
OMW! This clown is serious, and this isn’t the Onion!
Yeah, scary world we live in now.
The unions would never let that happen unless, of course, those welfare recipients were forced to join the unions, and then the operation would cause the government even deeper into debt.
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