Costs for federal jobs guarantee quickly spiral out of control.

Unfortunately, Democrats do not yet have a proposal that can bring these aspirations to life. One problem to work through is the traditional Democratic question of how to finance their new program. (Republican policy ideas never have this issue —they just put everything on the credit card and stick the next president with the bill.) It’s quite a large expenditure, perhaps half a trillion dollars a year, depending on the exact contours. Progressives have circulated polling showing support for a job guarantee financed by a 5 percent income tax hike on earnings over $200,000 a year, but Josh Bivens at the liberal Economic Policy Institute notes that that would cover less than a fifth of the cost.

And even that figure optimistically assumes the federal job guarantee would attract only people who are currently unemployed or underemployed. Since the most popular job guarantee plans would offer relatively solid wages and benefits ($15 an hour plus benefits), they would probably draw applicants who currently have jobs with stingier compensation. If that happened, as you’d expect, the cost of the program might balloon up to several times over. Once you start financing the program with taxes on the middle class — which would probably be necessary given the scale of its cost — then the popularity would drop off precipitously.