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.
Doing what? Digging holes and then filling them in again? A great pct. of non-workers are lazy, shiftless people who you'd have to whip to get any work done. And then the "work" you'd get would most likely be very substandard. I like the idea of punishing people who don't like to work for a living...by making them starve.
Instead of a make work program, make those living in Section 8 housing spend part of their time maintaining it like picking up litter. Require those who collect SNAP to spend time sorting and distributing freebies, like food coops that give a discount to those who sort food into boxes and distribute them.
Instead of government becoming an employer, use those already one benefits in some form or fashion.
Unionized and guaranteed retirement benefits starting at age 48.
Yet another Ivy League genius, lacking any comprehension about the simplest of economic concepts. He’ll soon be working for the Obama Administration.
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.A shovel is a useful garden tool. But when there is a big excavation job to do and a bulldozer to do it with, digging with a shovel instead of operating the bulldozer does not satisfy the motivation for having a job - which is to convey dignity. The dignity of a job flows from the dignity of the boss. And the dignity of the boss flows from his responsibility for the money he pays for the job. The responsibility of the boss for the money he pays flows from the fact that money is credit, in the sense that"It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena . . . who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds . . .Ultimately the money the boss pays is and must be scarce; if the boss simply writes meaningless IOUs for the payment, the job is and can only be “just dismal make-work.”And that is the fundamental reason the government can’t create jobs by fiat. To impart dignity, a job must have an extrinsic purpose. The minute you start out from the premise of giving Joe a "job,” Joe is already being patronized - and your purpose is already defeated. Start from the need, find a way for Joe to fill it, and you have done something. Joe is a solution looking for a problem. If Joe is a problem and the solution is to put him to work, “just dismal make-work” follows as the night follows the day.
There is scant difficulty in finding things to do whose value is not zero.
The great problem is to find things to do which are seen to be actually worth doing.
Everyone has a right to an opportunity. When the market isn’t hag-ridden, the opportunity will be there.
This is plunderful.
I agree that an “opportunity” is important.
However, in this day and age “opportunity” means your chance to trip up a prospective employer so that you can have the “opportunity” to sue him to have the “opportunity” to live the high life for the rest of your life.
Opportunity is the chance to show a prospective employer just why you would be a good employee. It’s not an opportunity to force a prospective employer to hire you in fear of a legal torpedo with the word “racial bigot, faggot hater, and all other types of social vermin” on it.
In my original post I stated the word “earn.” A large portion of today’s potential applicants for a job “DEMAND, EXPECT, OR think that based on color or sexual choice, they are given the right to the job by the Supreme Court of the United States......and they are right.
I am an employer and I see it everyday.
Would love to have a conversation with this guy about why, if the government can just guarantee stuff, it doesn’t guarantee a nice retirement whenever we want, rather than just a job.
Probably won’t take him long to start stumbling.
“Lay-offs is the rational answer. Gov can only grow so big and with the promises of lifetime retirement for minimal effort the Gov cannot keep raising taxes to cover it.”
That certainly has been Chris Christie’s response in NJ (and the taxpayers voted him back for a second term comfortably). In the past the state would bail out the insolvent urban toilets; under Christie the state stopped that. The layoffs were a good start, and I believe we’ll be seeing more shortly...
Thanks for the ping/post to this great thread of comments.
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