JG wouldn’t be much different than previous welfare programs
Dylan Matthews 18, Senior correspondent and head writer for Vox's Future Perfect section and has worked at Vox since 2014, 4-27-18, “4 big questions about job guarantees,” https://www.vox.com/2018/4/27/17281676/job-guarantee-design-bad-jobs-labor-market-federal-reserve // KG
Indeed, job guarantee programs bear a certain resemblance to “workfare” programs in the 1990s, where cash welfare was replaced with subsidies given to poor households in exchange for the head of household actively seeking work. Leftists and liberals generally hated those proposals at the time, viewing them as a scheme to take benefits away from people who find it hard to work.
A job guarantee wouldn’t be taking existing benefits away from people; it would be conditioning new benefits on work. That’s a very significant difference, not least because the pay for job guarantee jobs would be much greater than welfare benefits used to be.
But if a job guarantee plan winds up stranding people in $15-an-hour government jobs when they’d be happier either not working or working in jobs with clearer future prospects, then it would somehow combine the worst of normal welfare (whose high phaseout rates trapped recipients in a situation where they couldn’t work on top of it even if they wanted to) and workfare (which imposed strict and punitive requirements on households whether or not they could work).