FGJ is an unrealistic imagination

An employer normally pays an employee because the latter is doing something of value. Under a federal job guarantee, that logic is reversed: the government must find something for ten million or more workers to do because they are being paid. The difference is of great importance. The work handed out under a job guarantee is subject to complex criteria. In the view of the Levy report, these jobs must • Be able to “quickly accommodate new entrants into the program and let them go without disruption should they find alternative employment” • Help low-skilled workers build human capital to “enhance their chances to obtain work outside the program. They will gain work experience as well as on-the-job training.” • In every community, “provide visible benefits, meeting specific local needs” • Put millions to work “without competing for employees or displacing private sector undertakings” or “conventional public-sector work” These points, taken together, are astonishing.14 The work given to enrollees must teach valuable skills, but not so valuable that someone securely employed in the private sector would want to enroll. And while the work needs to result in “visible benefits,” these benefits should not be so great that any firm or government agency would be willing on its own to pay a wage of fifteen dollars per hour.15 The Levy report’s authors see concerns about finding such work as a failure of imagination: Is there really a dearth of useful things that might be done by our unemployed workers? Have we become so blind that we cannot see our failing infrastructure, our understaffed parks with their closed swimming pools and unkempt trails, the unmet needs of our seniors and our children, our polluted ponds and streams that require cleanup, and our low-income housing that would benefit from repairs and insulation? Are we really so unimaginative that we cannot think of a way to match our jobless with paid work tackling the unmet tasks surrounding us? Beyond examples such as these, both reports leave the job guarantee’s implementation, and its feasibility, to the reader’s imagination. The remainder of this section will consider the logistical details of finding and assigning work to over ten million people without the aid of the market, while also meeting the above criteria. While largescale, centralized proposals can sound good in the abstract, even scratching the surface of the logistics involved shows how they quickly break down, sometimes catastrophically.