Imagine if a well-paying job, with benefits and a high enough salary to pay for rent, transportation, and food, were a human right.
Imagine the US federal government established a policy whereby anyone who didn’t have a job and wanted one could go into a local office for a government agency — call it the Works Progress Administration — and walk out with a regular government position paying a livable wage ($15 an hour, perhaps) and offering health, dental, and vision insurance, and retirement benefits, and child care for their kids.
Different people would do different things: teaching or working for after-school programs or providing child care or building roads and mass transit or driving buses and so on. But everyone would be guaranteed a job, including during recessions. Involuntary unemployment would be a thing of the past. No one who works would be in poverty.
That’s a truly radical policy idea. But it has deep roots in the Democratic Party’s past, from the New Deal’s emergency employment programs to the Humphrey-Hawkins Act, a 1970s proposal that, as originally written, would have given unemployed Americans the right to sue the government.Only a brief mention of MMT by way of Pavlina Tcherneva.
Today, there are even some actual proposals on the table. In May, the Center for American Progress issued a report calling for a "large-scale, permanent program of public employment and infrastructure investment."…
Still another outline from economist Pavlina Tcherneva, a professor at Bard College and its Levy Economics Institute, would also provide a guarantee, and allocate enrollees across nonprofit organizations rather than having the federal government provide jobs directly.Then the kicker:
While Tcherneva doesn’t go into this, such a plan would almost certainly amount to a massive subsidy to religious organizations, given how dominated the US nonprofit sector is by local religious groups and charities.This is a sure-fire way to get the right on board.
Summary: Only a brief mention of Pavlina and no mention of the extensive MMT contribution to the job guarantee literature, but kudos to Dylan for putting the idea on the table.
1 comment:
This was the best article I have ever read on the JG (other than possibly my own article). Matthews asked the right questions and presented both sides of the debate.
He didn't mention Henry Wallace's JG or Bayard Rustin's JG, either. MMT did not invent the JG. MMT got it from Minsky who got it from Rustin. Rustin was picking up where Henry Wallace left off. Before Wallace, there were other proposals dating at least as far back as Coxey's army in 1894, which called for putting the unemployed to work on infrastructure and paying for it by printing money.
"...for the government to create jobs which would involve building roads and other public works improvements, with workers paid in paper currency which would expand the currency in circulation, consistent with populist ideology."
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