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[Washington Post] Bernie Sanders to announce plan to guarantee every American a job

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by Os Trigonum, Apr 24, 2018.

  1. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...unveil-plan-to-guarantee-every-american-a-job

    Bernie Sanders to announce plan to guarantee every American a job

    by Jeff Stein April 23 Email the author
    [​IMG]
    Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will propose a jobs guarantee program for every American worker “who wants or needs one.” (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

    Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will announce a plan for the federal government to guarantee a job paying $15 an hour and health-care benefits to every American worker “who wants or needs one,” embracing the kind of large-scale government works project that Democrats have shied away from in recent decades.

    Sanders's jobs guarantee would fund hundreds of projects throughout the United States aimed at addressing priorities such as infrastructure, care giving, the environment, education and other goals. Under the job guarantee, every American would be entitled to a job under one of these projects or receive job training to be able to do so, according to an early draft of the proposal.

    A representative from Sanders's office said they had not yet done a cost estimate for the plan or decided how it would be funded, saying they were still crafting the proposal.

    Sanders joins two other rumored 2020 Democratic presidential contenders who have expressed support for the idea of a jobs guarantee. The push reflects a leftward move in the party's economic policy, away from President Barack Obama's use of public-private partnerships or government incentives to reshape private markets and toward an unambiguous embrace of direct government intervention.

    Job guarantee advocates say their plan would drive up wages by significantly increasing competition for workers, ensuring that corporations have to offer more generous salaries and benefits if they want to keep their employees from working for the government. Supporters say it also would reduce racial inequality, because black workers face unemployment at about twice the rates of white workers, as well as gender inequality, because many iterations of the plan call for the expansion of federal child-care work.

    “The goal is to eliminate working poverty and involuntary unemployment altogether,” said Darrick Hamilton, an economist at the New School who has advocated for a jobs guarantee program along with Stony Brook University's Stephanie Kelton and a group of left-leaning economists at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. “This is an opportunity for something transformative, beyond the tinkering we've been doing for the last 40 years, where all the productivity gains have gone to the elite of society.”

    Others, including some Democrats, are not convinced. The idea is also dead on arrival with Republicans in control of Congress, and conservatives have trashed the idea of a jobs guarantee as impractical, impossibly expensive and dangerous to the private sector.

    “It completely undercuts a lot of industries and companies,” said Brian Riedl, of the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, a think tank. “There will be pressure to introduce a higher wage or certain benefits that the private sector doesn't offer.”

    Ernie Tedeschi, an economist who served in Obama's Treasury Department, said there would be large logistical and practical challenges in ensuring millions of new federal jobs serve productive ends.

    “It would be extremely expensive, and I wonder if this is the best, most targeted use of the amount of money it would cost,” he said.

    Critics point to potential unintended consequences in the plan. Although it would probably boost wages for workers, those higher wages could bump up costs for private businesses, leading some to hire fewer workers or take other steps — such as reducing benefits or looking to replace workers with machines.

    These effects would be more pronounced if the plan were to pull away workers who hold private-sector jobs, rather than pulling in workers without jobs who wanted them. The unemployment rate currently sits at 4.1 percent, a historically low figure. But that figure does not include people who've given up looking for work, and the labor force participation rate — a broader measure of those not working — suggests there may be people not counted among the unemployed who would join the labor force.

    The new government spending could also lead to inflation, decreasing the real value of workers' wages.

    Obama's economic initiatives, generally, focused on using the government to influence private markets and industries in pursuit of policy goals. His economic stimulus plan — in which he and Democrats tried to pull the United States out of a deep recession — channeled money through private enterprises to boost hiring and investment, and offered tax cuts and rebates in the hope of getting people to spend more.

    But in a new political climate, ideas such as a jobs guarantee plan is gaining traction among prominent Democrats. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.) backed the idea on Twitter earlier this month. As first reported by Vox, Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.) last week also announced his intention to introduce a separate bill that would create a pilot program for a job guarantee in 15 rural and urban areas.

    Under the early draft of Sanders's job guarantee, local, state and American Indian tribe governments in every section of the country would send proposals for public works projects for their areas to 12 regional offices that encompass the country. These 12 regional offices would act as a clearinghouse for these projects, tasked with sending recommended projects to a new national office within the Labor Department office for final approval.

    Once approved, the projects would hire workers at a minimum salary of $15 an hour with paid family and medical leave, and offer the same retirement, health, and sick and annual leave benefits as other federal employees.

    About 2,500 job training center and employment offices already exist around the country, and the plan imagines tasking them with connecting workers to these local projects. When the programs are up and running, anyone can wander into a job center and — at least, in theory — find either job training or a job on one of these projects.

    The plan's authors envision millions of Americans being hired under the proposal, with the number going up during economic recessions in the private sector and down during economic booms. They also say it would significantly increase the government's involvement in the American economy to a level not seen since World War II, if ever in the country's history.

    Beyond how to pay for the plan, many other aspects of the jobs guarantee have not been specified.

    It's not clear what would happen to a worker who violated the terms of employment. The plan suggests creating a Division of Progress Investigation to “take disciplinary action if needed,” leaving authority to the head of the Labor Department. Aides to Sanders stress that the policy details remain in their initial stages.

    Proponents trace the idea to the New Deal era, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt pitched a “Second Bill of Rights” to Congress in 1944. First on the list: the “right to a useful and remunerative job.”

    “This is not a radical idea,” Hamilton said. “It was well-couched in the Democratic platform that existed during its heyday. I'm glad Democrats are trending back to their roots.”
     
  2. larsv8

    larsv8 Contributing Member

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    Bernie supporter, but thats too much in my opinion.

    Gotta love the guy though, who actually legitimately cares for the people of this country.
     
  3. Two Sandwiches

    Two Sandwiches Contributing Member

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    The idea of hiking minimum wage up to $15 is absurd.

    The people that that worked hard to get themselves from $9 up to $15 would be screwed. Not to mention small business owners.
     
  4. larsv8

    larsv8 Contributing Member

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    How would they be screwed?
     
  5. CometsWin

    CometsWin Breaker Breaker One Nine

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    BobboTheClown's post count is bound to plummet like a rock. o_O
     
  6. pirc1

    pirc1 Contributing Member

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    Pretty soon most of the people in the world would be looking at a government handout to get by as automation takes over.
     
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  7. body slam

    body slam Member

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    Not really screwed but more like a slap in the face.
     
    Two Sandwiches likes this.
  8. Jugdish

    Jugdish Member

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    Ah yes, the old "As long as someone's poorer than me, I'm alright" outlook. Dream big.
     
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  9. Rocketman1981

    Rocketman1981 Member

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    Wow!! Why didn't anyone else think of that. Why doesn't the government ensure everyone has a $15 an hour job!

    What a revelation. How horrible and dishonest to prey on people letting them think this is viable in order to get elected.
     
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  10. Major

    Major Member

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    Brilliant.
     
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  11. Major

    Major Member

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    Kind of like preying on people who think a corporate tax cut will trickle down to them because all the already-cash-rich companies will just start hiring people and giving out raises for the hell of it.
     
  12. Buck Turgidson

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    Right? Why the hell are they giving interviews about it?

    This seems to me to be another of Bernie's grand plans that sounds great, but is substantially divorced from reality.
     
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  13. pirc1

    pirc1 Contributing Member

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    Yup. He have some crazy ideas just like Trump.
     
  14. Bobbythegreat

    Bobbythegreat Member
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    Because they would go from being above minimum wage employees to minimum wage employees it would effectively be a huge pay cut for them. The poverty line would go from being right at 14k to just under 30k. At that point the argument would be for a 30 dollar an hour minimum wage.
     
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  15. juicystream

    juicystream Contributing Member

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    Overstatement, but yes inflation would seem unavoidable. Labor costs travel up the chain.
     
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  16. JuanValdez

    JuanValdez Contributing Member

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    I had to double check the link to make sure it was legit. This plan is stupid, ridiculous, and dangerous.

    Reading a book about the Terror during the French Revolution -- Robespierre and company. And they did a lot of crazy proto-socialist stuff, like dictate the prices of goods and wages and making it illegal to hoard, making shortages worse. They were looking at economic disaster anyway, being in the 4th year of revolution with invaders at the border. But you kind of give them a pass because its 1793 and economic theory is in its infancy. The importance of Karl Marx becomes very apparent when you look at what the utopianists of the 18th century would do to the proletariat in order to 'help' them. We saw it come back though in the USSR where, not yet ready for 'true communism', the government built a command economy where they not only set prices and wages, they directly managed the work. That didn't work either. Sanders doesn't go that far, nor does he propose anything truly socialist. But it does have some of the same characteristics of the command economies that the vanguards of the proletariat have turned to in the past because they don't trust free markets. It's not going to work. It'd probably be worse than Trump's protectionism. What probably annoys me most about it is the total lack of imagination. People came up with the same dumb idea hundreds of years ago, if not thousands. We're a lot more sophisticated now in understanding economics and markets, understanding why command economies aren't strong, why monopolies don't work. So bring a clever idea, not some tired idea from the New Deal (one I could argue was actually a good idea during the era of the New Deal, btw, but totally out of place now). Figure out a way to tweak competitive markets such that workers can command higher salaries, that returns on capital investments are more broadly distributed in society, that companies and other organizations have incentives to invest in human capital. Putting millions of people on the federal payroll to not produce enough value to justify their wages is not a recipe for success, even if it does put upward pressure on private employment wages. To really increase people's wealth in a real way, we need to increase the value of their work, not the nominal price they're paid.
     
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  17. Bobbythegreat

    Bobbythegreat Member
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    It's not really an overstatement at all, the poverty line is usually right under what a minimum wage job pays for 40 hours a week for a year. When the minimum wage was 5.85 an hour, the poverty line was at 10k. Now it's 7.25 an hour and the poverty line is 12k. If there was a national minimum wage of 15 an hour, the poverty line would likely be right at 28k a year maybe a hair under that. Not immediately of course, but within a year or two.

    It was the same conversation I had when they were talking about raising it to whatever the hell it is now, only the exaggeration used at that point was that people would soon be asking for 15 bucks an hour, now the exaggeration is that people will soon be asking for 30 bucks an hour. They never seem to learn that jacking the minimum wage up doesn't actually help people.
     
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  18. Two Sandwiches

    Two Sandwiches Contributing Member

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    If you're making $15 an hour as a LPN, say, and some kid at McDonald's comes out of high school making $15 an hiur, that's messed up.

    Many jobs that required some technical schooling would basically be surpassed by entry level, mindless jobs. One could see a future where these jobs were understaffed and laxkong of qualified canddidates.

    Sure that may even itself out in fifty years, but what happens when the inflation rate catches up to the new $15 rate? I get screwed too, even though I make much more than that. My company surely won't give me a raise to adjust for inflation.
     
  19. sealclubber1016

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    No s**t right?

    I think we all acknowledge the gulf between the have and have nots isn't good. But It astounds me how "smart" people can't understand why true socialist economies stagnate and how inflation occurs.

    Bernie always comes across as a genuinely nice guy who "wants" to do the right thing, but has no f**king clue how to actually accomplish it.
     
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  20. Amiga

    Amiga I get vaunted sacred revelations from social media
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    The key difference is one idea has a large pool of prey while the other doesn’t.
     

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