How About We Just Give Jobs To People Who Want Jobs?

[JackLuis]

How About We Just Give Jobs To People Who Want Jobs?

Thursday's New York Times brought us, for a change, a story about progressive policy ideas, untainted by any pilgrimages to an Iowa diner to ask "undecided" Trump voters what they think. And by golly, it resulted in a pretty good article on proposals for a federal jobs guarantee. Mind you, the Times did have to include a very serious guy from the freaking American Enterprise Institute among the economists it interviewed for the piece, so there could be someone to warn that if the federal government provided jobs to anyone who wants one, the labor market would be completely ruined. Still, it's encouraging to see the Grey Lady dip a toe into the waters of progressive think-tank proposals and not get eaten by thinksharks.

The piece, by Eduardo Porter, notes that a fair number of Democratic politicians and even "mainstream economists" think it would be a good idea to move beyond typical liberal goals of building a strong economy and then hoping full employment will follow. The idea of a federal jobs guarantee, Porter says, is looking pretty good to many right now, with the economy in a mess due to the pandemic, not to mention the class and social divides of the last year. Cory Booker has been big on the idea, and the Green New Deal explicitly made good government-paid jobs a main selling point in the push to switch to a clean energy economy. In a nice bit of timing, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) this week rolled out her own proposal for a federal jobs guarantee, too.

And now, says Porter, the political landscape is starting to look friendlier for sweeping government programs again:

Those Socialists!

 

[YDB95]

This will run into the usual right wing scaremongering, fuelled not by worries that it won't work but by worries that - like Social Security and Medicare - it WILL work.

 

[Biggs_Darklighter]

This will run into the usual right wing scaremongering, fuelled not by worries that it won't work but by worries that - like Social Security and Medicare - it WILL work.

Social Security works?

 

[jaF0]

Unions wouldn't stand for anything similar to a Works Progress Administration or Civilian Conservation Corp. It would have to be full union and/or GSA wage scale with full benefits. That would cost far more than anything proposed.

I'm not in favor of bigger Government for any purpose at all, let alone just for adding jobs. The massive size of Government needs to be reduced, not increased.

 

[Champakian]

What jobs will people be "given?"

Will they be fulfilling jobs? Real careers?
Is the government even capable of producing such a profound paradigm shift?

Can you demonstrate the viability of such an ivory-tower goal by its successful "employment" elsewhere?

Which economic powerhouse has actually achieved such a noble goal as "full employment?"

 

[CornusKousa]

How About We Just Give Jobs To People Who Want Jobs?



Those Socialists!

Ask a Ukrainian, Cuban or N. Korean how that worked out....LOL

Or just move to Venezuela, bet you fuckin' wont.

 

[CornusKousa]

This will run into the usual right wing scaremongering, fuelled not by worries that it won't work but by worries that - like Social Security and Medicare - it WILL work.

It's not scaremongering....it's documented history.

You should try reading up on it sometime.

 

[CornusKousa]

What jobs will people be "given?"

Will they be fulfilling jobs? Real careers?
Is the government even capable of producing such a profound paradigm shift?

Can you demonstrate the viability of such an ivory-tower goal by its successful "employment" elsewhere?

Which economic powerhouse has actually achieved such a noble goal as "full employment?"

They have zero clue as to how money is made much less understand the real reason jobs exist.

 

[Champakian]

They have zero clue as to how money is made much less understand the real reason jobs exist.

I've actually discussed economics with representatives of this "political" school of thought
and the overwhelming consensus on the Left is that the government prints money as needed
and then they conflate money with wealth, so technically, there can be no impoverished countries,
all they have to do is just print more money and there will be more wealth to go around.

 

[CornusKousa]

I've actually discussed economics with representatives of this "political" school of thought
and the overwhelming consensus on the Left is that the government prints money as needed
and then they conflate money with wealth, so technically, there can be no impoverished countries,
all they have to do is just print more money and there will be more wealth to go around.

It's pretty amazing their level of economic/historical ignorance.

Most of them don't even know what the fuck money is much less why printing more of it doesn't work.

After so much failure it's amazing these "ideas" are still around.

We as a nation have failed horribly in the education department. Hell, nearly half the country thinks there is nothing more American than a totalitarian communist regime. It's the most bizzare shit I've ever seen......

Comrade Jack Louis is allegedly even a veteran...yet also a total communist. What the fuck??? How does that even happen???

 

[Champakian]

We really need to go back to the Gold and Silver standard if our "money"
is to have any value that you can trust in going into the future.
As it is, too many are content with the quantity of dollars
over the quality (purchasing power) of their dollars.
Inflation is just a funny, funny word used
by those stupid conservative types.

There are a couple of other rare metals that could be added to that basket.
But being backed by the full-faith of government probably cannot work much longer
seeing how faith and confidence in the government seems to be a fading and failed idea...

 

[OldJourno]

This will run into the usual right wing scaremongering, fuelled not by worries that it won't work but by worries that - like Social Security and Medicare - it WILL work.

Social Security and Medicare are about to run over the financial cliff. But it was fun while it lasted.

 

[OldJourno]

How About We Just Give Jobs To People Who Want Jobs?



Those Socialists!

The idea that we need a federal program creating jobs out of thin air is ridiculous. Red states already have low jobless rates because they have mostly opened up. The high jobless rates are in the Blue states.
All they have to do is open up.
And they can. The China virus infection rate is plunging, herd immunity will be reached in the U.S. in April. If the government can avoid the temptation to do something the economy will be fine.

 

[Comshaw]

Unions wouldn't stand for anything similar to a Works Progress Administration or Civilian Conservation Corp. It would have to be full union and/or GSA wage scale with full benefits. That would cost far more than anything proposed.

And what pray tell is wrong with that? To expensive? Isn't it just as expensive to pay them to do nothing? Or is it more a case of "I don't want them getting the same as I have"? Or is it that you don't like collective bargaining? Since you want the government involved as little as possible, do you want to let the corporations be the ones to decide who gets paid what? The companies get all the say and the workers none? That it? Or are you saying on one hand you want smaller government, but on the other government should set the wages and benefits? Oh, I get it! Socialism! We just can't have unions 'case they be a bunch of socialists!
FFS

I'm not in favor of bigger Government for any purpose at all, let alone just for adding jobs. The massive size of Government needs to be reduced, not increased.

Massive size of government!

It's really hard to gauge how much government has grown. But IF you use the number of Fed employees as a marker:

https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-FL055_Growin_G_20141107102632.jpg

Yeah...


Comshaw

 

[Fuzzy1975]

We really need to go back to the Gold and Silver standard if our "money"
i.

You do realise that if Obama had to abide by the "Gold" standard he would never have been able to use quantitative easing to pull the US out of the economic disaster of 2008 right? Chances are good the world would still be in an economic downturn.

You also realise that the little plastic credit card we all seem to have access to, would not exists for the average person right?

In the days of the standard, credit was tightly controlled.

Why, because for a bank to offer credit ( increase the amount of the total credit outstanding), it had to either increase it's cash deposits X% to offset the loan it was to underwrite, or to purchase more gold to offset that X% of the loan.

The best move in the modern economy was to move from a banking system that relied on a backup of a precious commodity as collateral for loans, to an economy where loans work on confidence.

Currently, when a bank offers a credit card, it has now increased into the economy in real dollars, the amount of that issued line of credit assigned to that particular card. The only backing to that credit is the confidence of the bank in issuing said credit card.

And we should note that the president who made this move was RMN, not typically thought of as a Democrat....

 

[LLCox]

Social Security works?

For a lot of old people (who have paid in) it's better than nothing. My friends SS received a 1% COLA and her check was a dollah less. Medicare gets their bite first. No one on SS is pulling anything over on you.

 

[Ramone45]

They have zero clue as to how money is made much less understand the real reason jobs exist.

^^This. One hundred percent.

 

[YDB95]

I've actually discussed economics with representatives of this "political" school of thought
and the overwhelming consensus on the Left is that the government prints money as needed
and then they conflate money with wealth, so technically, there can be no impoverished countries,
all they have to do is just print more money and there will be more wealth to go around.

Sounds like confirmation bias to me. I'm a member of the group you're referring to and I've never heard anyone say a thing like that. You see, we know our history and we know what happens when too much money is printed.

 

[KeithD]

Social Security works?

Yes, and it would work even better if Congress stopped stealing money from it.

 

[Champakian]

You do realise that if Obama had to abide by the "Gold" standard he would never have been able to use quantitative easing to pull the US out of the economic disaster of 2008 right? Chances are good the world would still be in an economic downturn.

...

Now, here's your problem of the day; prove that this, and your other "conditions" would
still have arisen with the Gold Standard in place...

 

[Champakian]

Sounds like confirmation bias to me. I'm a member of the group you're referring to and I've never heard anyone say a thing like that. You see, we know our history and we know what happens when too much money is printed.

Okay. Define "too much."

 

[Fuzzy1975]

Now, here's your problem of the day; prove that this, and your other "conditions" would
still have arisen with the Gold Standard in place...

So the above means you either don't understand Quantitative easing, or the gold standard, I am not sure which...*chuckles*

The hypothetical of using QE on the gold standard: when Obama used QE to buy out the failing banks debts, under the standard, as the government minted more dollars to buy the bank paper, they also would have needed to buy more gold to ensure the monetary value of the dollars they printed buoyed up that dollar value. ( if you doubt this, then think of counterfeiting , and why it was so detrimental to the gold standard).

The result is a rise in the price of gold, which is a good thing, right? Since the value of the dollar is tied to the price of gold, right?

Well the fly in the ointment is billions of dollars of gold would need to be bought, and we know with the commodity market that a major buy order on gold, drives up the price. Which leads to inflationary pressure.

QE is only effective in low to zero interest rates ( otherwise the purchase to debt ratio is too expensive to make it a long term recovery policy), so as that rate rises, which it would, you have now driven up the cost of the original debt purchase, as well as the future debt you will still need to buy, as the banks get liquidity back under their feet.

This would result in a run away inflationary pressure, on a banking system already on the verge of collapse.

The correct, ( well maybe not since the situation is hypothetical) approach under the gold standard would have been to sell gold off, not print new money, and try and buy up the failing bank debts in that manner. Would it have worked, who knows?

All I can say for sure is QE and dollars values being tied to a monetary ( commodity) standard is a road to failure when trying to prop up a failing banking system.

Another of the reasons RMN ( and many other countries) got off monitary standards.

 

[Champakian]

You still didn't answer the question, you just went back to your hand-picked starting point.



Would the banking system had been failing if it weren't for monetary policy
that was geared towards just pumping in money without any wealth creation?

 

[YDB95]

Would the banking system had been failing if it weren't for monetary policy
that was geared towards just pumping in money without any wealth creation?

If that really had been the case? Yes, the banking system likely would have failed.

 

[Fuzzy1975]

You still didn't answer the question, you just went back to your hand-picked starting point.



Would the banking system had been failing if it weren't for monetary policy
that was geared towards just pumping in money without any wealth creation?

So here is your question...below, and after I answer it, your deflection is noted above. I cannot rollback the clock to the 1970's and extrapolate forward in time to where I showed the gold standard would have failed. Everything was hypothetical, even your original question.

But I give you an A+ for deflection...

Now, here's your problem of the day; prove that this, and your other "conditions" would
still have arisen with the Gold Standard in place...