Job guarantee legislation is a brilliant idea, from a purely political perspective, for the Democrats. It is essentially a left-wing version of tariffs: a program of wealth redistribution that is tied to work and so is immune to the usual Victorian objections about giving benefits to the undeserving poor. It is designed to unite the interests of white and minority workers, thereby drawing Reactionary voters away from the GOP, and to provide inspiration to activists. It will undoubtedly be taken seriously during the 2020 campaign.
From a policy perspective, however, it raises lots of serious issues, including the following:
1. What kind of jobs would these people be doing? This isn’t the Great Depression, when you could mobilize millions of unskilled workers to do manual labor. The unfilled jobs of today are in health care, senior care, and teaching. Do you want to trust your parents and kids to poorly-trained volunteers? Even infrastructure maintenance requires more skill now than it did in the 1930’s.
2. Who pays for this, and how much? This would be a hugely expensive program. The rich can’t pay for everything, and the deficit is already enormous.
3. Who actually runs the program? State and local bureaucracies would have to swell to accommodate the needs of the program. There would be lots of opposition to that.
4. How would the Fed react? Increasing wages and the size of the deficit would lead to much higher interest rates, and slow down the economy, thereby increasing the cost of the program.
5. Why now? Unemployment is not really an issue today.
You can just imagine GOP commercials filled with images of people milling around and doing nothing meaningful, while being paid $15 per hour by the taxpayers. There would be some justice to that. I can’t see this happening.