FJG causes a drastic federal takeover that is detrimental to the private sector and economy
Gulker 18(Max Gulker is a Senior research fellow at the AEIR, “The Job Guarantee: A Critical Analysis” 11-18-2018 https://www.aier.org/article/the-job-guarantee-a-critical-analysis-executive-summary/#:~:text=A%20federal%20job%20guarantee%20would%20be%20monumentally%20expensive%2C,for%20economic%20growth%20and%20the%20private%20labor%20market.) [CT]
A federal job guarantee would be monumentally expensive, return only limited value from the participants’ work, entail administrative challenges nearly impossible to solve, and be potentially disastrous for economic growth and the private labor market.
Relying on rigorous but basic economics and data analysis, we find the following:
Job-guarantee participants would be placed in a system that eschewed the most fundamental ways that markets provide information and incentives, such as competition and freely set wages (section 3).
Under the authors’ own projections of ten to seventeen million participants, a federal job guarantee would, by several-fold, create the world’s largest organization (public or private) measured by employees (section 4).
Under the authors’ own projections, the program’s annual cost would be comparable to that of the Pentagon (section 4).
There are multiple reasons why the CBPP and Levy reports may have underestimated participation and cost (section 4).
Both the CBPP and Levy reports set standards for the type of work to be provided that would be difficult if not impossible to attain, place burdens on state and local governments, and return work of very limited value (section 5).
An on-demand job guarantee of the scale and scope proposed could cause massive distortions in the wider economy leading to less output and growth, and could prevent workers from investing in critical human capital (section 6).