Jhoon
Spontaneous Mishaps and Hijinks
Why engage with that clown?
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez - "Not All Dems Are The Same"
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Sir Charles Barkley
The Chuckster
She flunks interviews just on the basis of her policies and her ideas though
Federal job guarantee
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This isn't a new concept, from 1944-1988, full employment was a cornerstone objective of the Democratic Party's policy platform, though a rare act of "historical amnesia" seems to have wiped it off American's minds.She flunks interviews just on the basis of her policies and her ideas though
Federal job guarantee
Sir Charles Barkley
The Chuckster
The govt can guarantee everyone a job you nitwit
What happens when the amount of applicants supersedes the amount of jobs?
There are plenty of socially useful projects workers employed under the job guarantee could perform. If history is any guide, we can look at the wonders built under the Works Progress Administration, which employed over 8.5 million different workers from 1935-1943. But what would the workers do? Well, they could rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, help facilitate our transition to a green economy, and provide high quality universal child care and education (which is now more expensive than college in many states) just to name a few ideas.The govt can guarantee everyone a job you nitwit
What happens when the amount of applicants supersedes the amount of jobs?
Sir Charles Barkley
The Chuckster
The govt doesn’t create value, they get their money from TAXPAYERS.
There will never be enough jobs to meet this insane demand. We have 300m ppl in this country. Even if they “create” jobs out of thin air, it would be at the taxpayers expense.
But again this is never going to happen because this is not a fantasy land and there’s no way they can guarantee a job to that many ppl.
You do know that government workers also pay taxes?
Critiques of the federal job guarantee — from the left and the center — make some valid points. Job guarantee positions would rise and fall with the business cycle, so they couldn’t be so essential that the nation would experience a shortage of teachers or child care workers when recessions ended and people returned to the private sector. (One way around this is to make job guarantee positions align with apprenticeships.)
Sir Charles Barkley
The Chuckster
You do know that government workers also pay taxes?
Critiques of the federal job guarantee — from the left and the center — make some valid points. Job guarantee positions would rise and fall with the business cycle, so they couldn’t be so essential that the nation would experience a shortage of teachers or child care workers when recessions ended and people returned to the private sector. (One way around this is to make job guarantee positions align with apprenticeships.)
there’s no way to do it without bankrupting the entire country.
Wal Mart pays its own employees out of its pocket using its own profits. The govt would be paying its employees out of other people’s pockets with no ceiling on how much they’re allowed to take. Tell me how this is a sustainable plan.
More people join the program? they would need to raise taxes.
More applicants than jobs? they would need to create new jobs... and raise people’s taxes.
Mind you there may or may not even be a need for these jobs. They could be benefiting no one except the person working them, it wouldn’t matter. The people have no say.
You can’t just keep robbing Peter to pay Paul... eventually Peter will run out of money.
Whether America Can Afford a Job Guarantee Program Is Not Up for Debate
Those fresh to the debate, meanwhile, instinctively ask what feels like an intuitive question: How on earth can we pay for that?
But if we’re going to have an honest debate about whether the government should be spending hundreds of billions of dollars so that people can obtain jobs, we should acknowledge that the government already does. Officials at the local, state, and federal levels push enormous amounts of money toward this stated purpose — they just channel it through corporations, in the form of special tax breaks and “economic development” subsidies. It’s not clear that businesses actually use all that money to create jobs, rather than just enjoying the subsidies and tax cuts for themselves, so if the true purpose really is to create work for people, the new jobs guarantee debate offers a much simpler — and probably much cheaper — approach to the same end.
So while it’s worth talking about the best way to achieve full employment, the question of whether we can afford to spend the money can be dismissed. We can.
The job guarantee proposal from Mark Paul, Sandy Darity, and Darrick Hamilton for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated an annual program cost of $543 billion, enough to pop out the eyes of more cautious policymakers. This would be partially offset by reduced demand for benefit programs for the working poor, like food stamps, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, as well as the increased economic activity driving up tax revenues across the country. A report from economists at the Levy Institute put final costs at between $260 and $354 billion annually in the first five years and lower outlays after that.
Put aside the fact that America controls its own money supply and that modern monetary theory suggests that the country need not actually pay for all federal spending. The question here is whether the nation can possibly manage spending $354 billion a year toward the goal of ensuring that all Americans have a job if they want one. Here’s the often-overlooked data needed to answer that question.
Subsidies from state and local governments to attract employers to locate their facilities cost as much as $80 billion a year. I have to say “as much as” because local governments and businesses keep these deals secret. Even though the Governmental Accounting Standards Board requires localities to make such “economic development” deals public, around half of all local governments just don’t comply.
But thanks to public filings and the subsidy trackers at Good Jobs First, we know enough to confidently make the $80 billion a year estimate. Wisconsin promised $3 billion to Foxconn for a factory employing around 13,000 people at its peak. Cities and states have offered as much as $8.5 billion to Amazon for its second headquarters, which would house around 50,000 people. These giveaways can include tax abatements or forgiveness, cash grants for relocation expenses, and in Amazon’s case, even giving workers’ state payroll taxes back to the company to use for its own purposes.
It’s not clear that economic development subsidies create jobs, as much as they pit regions against one another to move jobs around to the benefit of large corporations rather than workers. A report from the Economic Policy Institute on Amazon’s $1.1 billion in known subsidies for “fulfillment center” warehouses found that they do not increase overall private sector employment within a particular county.
The $80 billion in economic development subsidies is just the beginning. The Trump tax cuts were sold on the basis of job creation effects. The Republican Congress called the bill the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.” Sen. Mitch McConnell parroted the typical GOP take on the bill when he wrote last year that the tax bill would “unleash the potential of American enterprise to create more jobs and keep more of them here.”
As a result, Republicans slashed the corporate tax rate by 40 percent, at a cost estimated by the Joint Committee on Taxation to be $1.34 trillion over the next 10 years. And like the economic development subsidies, the job creation potential of severely reducing corporate taxes is debatable. Even though the logic of the tax cuts was that they would give businesses more money to invest in equipment and wages, those measurements have actually fallen since the tax cut was enacted. GDP growth in the first quarter cooled off a bit compared to the end of 2017.
Combining economic development subsidies and corporate tax cuts comes out to an average annual total of $214 billion per year, spent chasing job creation by handing over money to corporations. And there’s more. Nearly every state in America offers job creation tax credits, literally money paid per job. There are massive incentives in each state available for film and television production. Special “bonus depreciation” rules allow companies to write down equipment costs, deferring taxes for years on investments. And there are dozens of other ways in which corporations grab public money with the promise of delivering jobs.
As Suzanne Mettler wrote in her well-regarded book “The Submerged State,” these kinds of under-the-surface perks and benefits form a barrier to activist government policies like a federal job guarantee. While enormous sums are funneled to private industry beneath the surface, the same policymakers who green-lit the expenditures claim that large public sector outlays to create jobs are fiscally impossible. This is nonsensical.
The current unemployment rate of 4.1 percent may lead those dumping hundreds of billions of dollars on corporations for job creation to suggest that their plan is working. But the lower employment/population ratioand tougher employment prospects for people of color suggests that there’s more to be done. A plan for publicly funded jobs to pick up the slack happens to be absurdly popular.
But the one critique that cannot really be put on the federal job guarantee is that it costs too much. Or at least, you cannot say this without ignoring the mountain of taxpayer money we already employ for that intended purpose. That existing money could be channeled into direct job creation pretty quickly. It’s entirely reasonable to differ on how to accomplish the ultimate goal of ending poverty and the crushing burdens, both psychological and material, of unemployment. But there’s no real debate on whether America can afford it. We’re already picking up the tab.
Jhoon
Spontaneous Mishaps and Hijinks
Walmart should expect to dig deeper in their pockets.
Sir Charles Barkley
The Chuckster
AnonymityX1000
Veteran
Centrists are just a bunch of cynics with no imagination. This will never happen, we can't afford this or that. You are not even doing any math just parroting centrists you see on TV.
Do you even question what we are spending money on now? 700 + billion annually on defense when the nation with the next highest budget is in the 200 something billions. If we only doubled our closest rival we would have 300+ billion dollars to spend on other stuff. If we did have a jobs guarantee welfare, mediacaid and food stamp programs would massively decrease. Spending on social Ills tied to unemployment like health problems, crime and incarceration would also decrease. And you would also have a much larger % of the population contributing to the economy, spending money, paying more taxes, stimulating business to hire more people. It could totally work.
Sir Charles Barkley
The Chuckster
Our military is what makes us the leaders of the world. I don’t mind that we spend more than other countries, it’s what keeps us at the top. When shyt pops off, you’ll be glad we spend as much as we do.
There is nothing the govt can do to improve the economy that the free market cannot. It just does it with less choices and with less freedoms
Basically, we can afford a federal jobs guarantee. Most of the cost plans are between 3-4% of GDP.
That tab would quickly shrink. With more people working at better wages, Americans would have more purchasing power to buy goods and services. This would lead to more hiring by the private sector, and eventually, less need for the federal job guarantee.
More people working would also generate more tax revenue, partially offsetting the direct cost of the job guarantee.
Additional savings would come from fewer people needing public assistance.