Sunday, May 6, 2018

Jerri-Lynn Scofield — What India Can Teach the US About a Federal Job Guarantee

India has for more than a decade had a rural jobs guarantee program in place, for unskilled workers. If India can succeed in designing and implementing such a policy, why can’t the US?
Economist Jayati Ghosh wrote this assessment of The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005 (MGNREGA) in The Guardian in 2015:
Naked Capitalism
What India Can Teach the US About a Federal Job Guarantee
Jerri-Lynn Scofield

8 comments:

Andrew Anderson said...

So, tell me again, why can’t a federal job guarantee work in the United States?

How can I when Yves Smith bans people she can't refute? Yep, that's one sure way to have the last word, Yves.

How about telling me why we can't have equal protection under the law wrt fiat and credit creation? And then maybe people would have less need for wages in the first place?

Matt Franko said...

"Yves Smith bans people"

LOL!!!!!

Andrew Anderson said...

What? You think I don't know her real name is Susan Webber?

Andrew Anderson said...

Tell me, Matt, given your fascist beliefs, is your real name Franko? I mean how appropriately named can one get, Generalissimo?

Kaivey said...

I like Andrew!

Konrad said...

@ Andrew Anderson:

Yves Smith has sometimes deleted my comments in the past, when I used to comment on her blog. For example, one time she made some observations about Zimbabwe that differed from my own views. I countered with a different analysis. I was very courteous and polite, but Ms. Webber evidently didn't like what I wrote. My comments were purged.

Anyway, according to Dean Baker, Sanders’s JG proposal “calls for the program to be administered at the state and local level.”

If that is true, then Sanders’s JG proposal is doomed. State and local governments are revenue constrained, and therefore do not have enough money for things like a JG, or for Universal Medicare at the state level.

Such programs can only work at the level of the U.S. government, which can create infinite money out of thin air.

Andrew Anderson said...


Such programs can only work at the level of the U.S. government, which can create infinite money out of thin air. Konrad

Or to keep the accounting scrupulously clean and neat, a citizen's dividend, for example, can be financed with negative yields/interest on US Sovereign Debt including bank reserves with a negative-interest-free exemption, up to say, $250,000, for each individual US citizen account at the Fed.

A nice feature to the negative-interest-free individual citizen accounts at the Fed is that a poor citizen might rent out his unused negative-interest-free account space to a bank, rich individual, company, etc. Wouldn't that be nice: the rich paying rent to the poor!

The above is the kind of thinking the MMT folks should be doing instead of obsessing over a JG.

GLH said...

I never go to Smith's blog. I was banned when Randell Wray claimed that New Deal 2.0 wasn't affected by taking Pete Peterson's money. That is bull shit. I quit going to both sites and reading anything by Randel Wray.