Job Guarantee Act of 2014 (Debating)

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Sponsor: President Pro Tempore TNF


The point of this bill is simple: to once and for all end unemployment. It creates a reserve fund that will shrink and grow as is necessary, reflecting fluctuations in the private sector labor market. It allows for the unemployed to participate directly in the formulation of policy and in the implementation of it, which will provide us with more rational project ideas (because who knows better what needs to be built or fixed in their communities than the people who live there) and will avoid the kind of corruption or cronyism that is otherwise endemic to a lot of public works spending.

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Bumping this for the inevitable running over the coals I'm going to get for introducing it.

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...I've been here before
grant he's the same...

slight pull from Gods and Generals there.

The cost of this will be astronomical, and as much difficulty as I am having in my present real life quest for employment, I still cannot bring myself to ignore that the costs of this and the effects paying for such on the economy. It would be destructive and likely destroy as many jobs as it creates if not more.

Nice citations you have there. I would like to just remind everyone that a program like the one I am proposing has been implemented before in this country. Actually, a few programs like it. The Civilian Conservation Corps, the Public Works Administration, the Works Progress Administration, and, oh yeah, the mass hiring of the out of work by the United States armed forces during World War II. Full employment and price stability are both possible, and both are totally affordable, we just have to be willing to use the ability to tax and print money to finance it.

Indeed, could we even afford the costs that such a program will implicate? We're talking about millions of people after all, and while we do need to discuss a budget for the next year pretty soon I don't think we will be able to handle that, just as I didn't believe that we could handle a single-payer system or other related proposals when we passed the Health Care reform a couple of months ago. Furthermore, wouldn't the MJA and AJA create something logistically worse than our current problems regarding beaurocracy?

I would hope that the idea for funding this is not just keep taxing the rich over and over again until we have the funds... (as was suggested in a different bill).

The alternative to taxing the rich is printing money. You choose, but I would definitely prefer the former.

The funding that goes toward giving the unemployed work, and the wages paid to those workers, will put money in their pockets that will allow them to spend that money and create more jobs in the private sector. Because of the way that this bill works, the actual number of workers employed by the Jobs Authority would shrink overtime in conjunction with the growth of private sector payrolls. It is basic countercyclical Keynesianism, not Marxism.

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Private employers have shown that they won't hire the unemployed. If they would, this wouldn't be necessary. We will either hire the unemployed or we will allow millions of people to starve. That's the choice here.

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Private employers have shown that they won't hire the unemployed. If they would, this wouldn't be necessary. We will either hire the unemployed or we will allow millions of people to starve. That's the choice here.

I disagree that's the choice.

You're wrong, but that essentially stems from the fallacy here that there has to be unemployment in order to maintain a functioning labor market. Perhaps that is true in a capitalist labor market, but guaranteed employment for all who wish to work would be a step in a direction away from a labor market in which workers are just another commodity to be bought and sold.

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1. To eradicate unemployment

2. Yes, it has been in the past and can be done again. The funds here shrink and grow with private sector unemployment, so costs will fluctuate according to the state of the private sector labor market. How hard is that to understand? It's in plain English in the text of the bill.

3. See 2

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It is necessary, given that I've reiterated it in post after post and we still have people asking how we can afford a program that shrinks if the private sector employment indicators are doing well.

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I don't see how the funding of this program is a problem. If we want to eliminate unemployment, it's going to cost money. We all know that. We can pay for this program via the amount of growth it will ultimately cause by putting otherwise unproductive labor to good use doing things that desperately need to get done.

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Amendment is reluctantly friendly.

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With the liquidation of a counter-cyclical fund for the eliminate of unemployment, yeah, it basically is. I don't see it going forward so I'm just going to propose we table this bill.

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Aye