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Monday 2 November 2009
The Challenge of Job Creation

Finally, to break the last taboo on this topic, why limit our job efforts to a fixed appropriation?  Why not just guarantee the right to a job?  A federal jobs pool, paying (say) eight dollars an hour to any citizen who wants to work, would do four very useful things.  It would eliminate unemployment for the hard cases: no matter how low-skilled, you could always come in and get a job.  It would set an effective minimum wage: no one would work legally for less.  For the same reason, it would make employers of cut-rate illegal labor relatively easy to find, and encourage legal permanent residents to seek citizenship.  Finally, it would eliminate the stigma of unemployment, which over time degrades the ability to find better jobs.

Employers like to hire the already-employed.  A federal jobs pool would give them a good place to look, where they could find workers with track records and supervisors able to give recommendations. An employed buffer stock of labor would be a great improvement over the present, vast mass of job-seeking unemployed.  And when private employers finally decide they need labor, they would hire from the pool—and spending on the public program would automatically decline.

Would all of this add to the deficit?  Yes. Providing jobs is more expensive, in budget terms, than keeping people on the dole.  But that’s not a bad thing right now.

And in a larger economic sense, it would be much cheaper.  You’d save the cost of the dole. And you’d get three things out of it—economic goods that the entire country could enjoy, solutions to some of our most pressing problems, and a working population that would be working, acquiring skills, getting on with life—and no doubt happier, into the bargain.

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