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Annie, The Atlantic, “A Promise So Big, Democrats Aren’t Sure How to Keep It,” May 11, 2018 dmr

There is also the cost. “It would take a level of funding for which we would have to very much alter our fiscal outlook,” Jared Bernstein, who was former Vice President Joe Biden’s chief economist and is now at CBPP, told me. Small pilot programs aimed at stopping recidivism might pay for themselves. But a true jobs guarantee would cost something like $400 to $700 billion a year now, and vastly more during a downturn. There are other sticky questions. How much should these jobs pay, and what kind of benefits should they provide? Would a jobs guarantee foment inflation? What would a jobs guarantee do to our understanding of the interplay between inflation, employment, and growth anyway? Would the government get rid of unemployment insurance? Would the jobs be permanent? If not, is that really a guarantee that ends joblessness, once and for all? If so, would that sap the country of some of the ingenuity of its private workforce? What share of the economy would be involved in care work? How much would that represent a movement from uncompensated, kitchen-table care work to compensated, workplace care work? For some Democratic policy wonks, the trade-offs in both economic and political capital seem the most salient. What do you give up by implementing a jobs guarantee? What comes first: a public option for health insurance, or a major jobs plan, or an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, or a universal child allowance, or a major educational debt-relief plan, or postal banking—all of which are ideas being pushed by Democratic presidential aspirants right now? “How much in life do you spend money on the last mile?” Gene Sperling, who was the director of the National Economic Council under Obama, asked me. “There are big, long-term unemployment problems, right? That’s complicated. Those are people who need a lot of help. They need a lot of support. Is that really the issue, or is the issue that the working poor are not making enough money to support their families? If you’re going to spend a trillion dollars on something huge …There’s an element here of people not thinking about what they’re actually trying to do.” In a technocratic sense, perhaps. But the technocratic problems that a jobs guarantee poses are not impossible to solve. There are good models. RecycleForce, for instance, cuts the recidivism rate of recently incarcerated individuals to 26 percent, versus a national rate of 64 percent, Keesling told me. And it saves the taxpayer $1.20 for every dollar invested. Surveys show that similar jobs programs have raised both earnings and employment rates for their participants, and also “decreased family public benefit receipt, raised school outcomes among the children of workers, boosted workers’ school completion, lowered criminal-justice system involvement among both workers and their children, improved psychological well-being, and reduced longer-term poverty,” a survey by the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality found. “There may be additional positive effects, such as increased child-support payments and improved health.” Scaling up transitional jobs initiatives would be a good start, then. “There’s nothing resembling an entitlement that supports a person coming home from prison right now,” Sam Schaeffer, the executive director of the Center for Employment Opportunities, a New York-based nonprofit that provides jobs and training to the formerly incarcerated in 20 cities, told me. “To really tackle this challenge, there should be some unifying mechanism, with a mix of workforce programs, anti-poverty programs, nutrition assistance, housing, and more. We’ll pay $82 billion a year to incarcerate people. We don’t make anything like a similar investment on reentry.” There are also models stemming from TANF-EF. JobsNOW! in San Francisco offers a tiered program to help workers with different levels of readiness for a paid job. One tier pays participants while they enroll in job-readiness or vocational training, or a high-school diploma program. It also pays participants to do relatively low-skill work at a nonprofit. Finally, there is a wage-subsidy program, aimed at individuals with work experience. On top of that, the program provides case management and wraparound services, helping ensure that participants have Medicaid and food stamps. All in all, it has increased its 20,000 participants’ earnings by an average of 55 percent, and three in four no longer need cash assistance two-and-a-half years after exiting the program. The evidence for what works is out there, and the need especially great in certain communities and with certain individuals. Starting with pilots and scaling them up, as Booker wants to do, makes sense. So does Khanna’s model of directing state and local governments to figure out what works for them, as TANF-EF did. So does Sanders’s idea of having “hundreds” of public-works initiatives. For all the blue-sky thinking and talk of a national, public-jobs guarantee, Democratic policymakers do seem to be taking the idea seriously, but not literally, to borrow a phrase. The idea is to indicate to the country that they want to tackle the biggest challenges with the biggest solutions—not to figure out every detail, pay for every dollar, appeal to every voter, and pass a policy bar their colleagues on the other side of the aisle have shown no interest in. That gives Democrats room to experiment. “This is not a panacea to solve the jobs problem. It has to be attacked in multiple ways,” Khanna told me. “I would argue that this is a first, serious proposal that by my own admission I would say is not intended to be perfect.” It avoids putting them in the position of negotiating themselves down. “I see it as really opening the Overton Window in a way that is a quite useful for this debate,” Bernstein said. “I’m not in the business of negotiating with myself at this point. Let’s let all the good ideas blossom.” It vaults over the need to figure out the most difficult parts of the legislation, like how much or how to pay for such a proposal. “I’m not gonna presume how we pay for it,” Tanden said. “I do think the Republican tax plan indicates how little Republicans care about deficits when it comes to taxes. I’m not saying that we won’t care about this. But obviously it makes that an easier conversation.” It also acknowledges that Republicans are unlikely to get on board with big Democratic ideas, freeing liberals to think bigger. “We live in the era of tribalism,” Tanden told me. “It’s hard to think through a proposal if Republicans feel like doing any deal with Democrats is noxious. Ipso facto, when a Democrat proposes something, they cannot support it because it’s the Democrats have creating it. That does not allow for compromise.”