Tag Archives: Job Guarantee

Michael Stephens | August 15, 2018 The job guarantee proposal fleshed out and analyzed by L. Randall Wray, Flavia Dantas, Scott Fullwiler, Pavlina Tcherneva, and Stephanie Kelton — dubbed the Public Service Employment (PSE) program — garnered a considerable amount of media attention as support for some version of a job guarantee began appearing on the agendas of various 2020 Democratic hopefuls. This panel discussion at the...

Summers comes out for a job guarantee and offers some qualifying comments. Overall positive.Maybe not an exactly a VSP endorsement of MMT or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but close enough to be considered a big win for the up-and-comers.It is a wake-up call to establishment Democratic policymakers as well as encouraging progressives.Larry SummersA jobs guarantee — progressives’ latest big ideaLawrence H. Summers | Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus at Harvard...

MMT economists advocate that the central government – the federal government in the U.S. – can and should employ every person who desires to work but cannot find work in the private sector at a living wage. This living wage, the MMT supporters point out, would function as a minimum wage, since no person would work for a private employer who offers a wage lower than the wage the government offers. Assuming such a reform could be implemented under the capitalist system, if your search for...

Weekend reading. There are only three entries. Easy read.Ed Zimmer is an engineer and has only recently encountered economics. But I had now picked up an interest in macroeconomics — and started seriously reading many of the economists' blogs and papers. But the more I read, the more disillusioned I became. Having no previous introduction to economics, I initially assumed economists were scientists (and that was reinforced by the math I was seeing). But as I read their blogs and papers...

The Job Guarantee is finally getting the public debate it deserves and criticism is expected. Building on several decades of research, the Levy Institute’s latest proposal analyzes the program’s economic impact and advances a blueprint for its implementation. Critics have taken note and are (thus far) restating the usual concerns, but with a notably alarmist tone. The latest, courtesy of the Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson, warns that the Job Guarantee would be 1) an expensive...

Must-read.  Its' a very positive article, but unfortunately, the job guarantee is not presented in terms of the basic issue — the choice between a buffer stock of employed or buffer stock of unemployed, and how the former is superior using efficiency and effectiveness as criteria. The other key issue is how the JG is an integral aspect of policy formulation that promises to reconcile the trifecta of growth, employment and price stability, previous thought to be impossible without...

Some useful history as background, but still no addressing the basic issue directly — buffer stock of employed or buffer stock of unemployed. Absent a truly socialistic system, this is the key issue to address. The rest is detail. Based on efficiency and effectiveness, a full employment economy is optimal. Redefinition of "full employment" to include millions of people out of work or not working full time when they desire a full time job is a lame excuse for a buffer stock of...

About what one would expect from Bloomberg.BloombergLeading Democrats Are Backing One of the Most Radical Economic Plans in Years Katia Dmitrieva with assistance by Sahil Kapur, and Jordan Yadoo

Let's be clear. What is really at issue is whether a buffer stock of employed is sociao-economically superior to a buffer stock of unemployed Efficiency A buffer stock of employed is far more efficient in that it employs available resources that would otherwise be idle (wasted). In addition, the funds that go toward supporting the out of work ignore the productive capacity of the unemployed. As the right is so find of pointing out, this incentivized unemployment. Effectiveness A...

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 CapitalismWhat India Can Teach the US About a Federal Job GuaranteeJerri-Lynn Scofield