Bernie Sanders to announce plan to guarantee every American a job
56 replies, posted
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/04/23/bernie-sanders-to-unveil-plan-to-guarantee-every-american-a-job/?utm_term=.c91597615992
The New New Deal folks. Get ready for 2020.
I hope it involves fixing the absolutely fucking wretched, decaying transportation infrastructure.
His trillion dollar infrastructure plan was a huge cornerstone to putting Americans to work in 2016. It's likely he's refined it further.
Power to him and all but that kind of slaps employment economics in the face, theres a reason you want more people than jobs rather than the inverse.
Like the more jobs the better but aiming to get enough for everyone is practically impossible, your going to go either side of that line no matter how hard you try and if you go too far in the other direction you just create even more problems.
You're all going to be employed as human sacrifices whose souls will be harvested in order to keep the demigod Bernie youthful FOREVER
Until capitalism is finally destroyed, money abolished, and automation in the hands of the people (as well as the rest of the means of production) doing most work, we either need to somehow get everyone working, or find a way to implement a UBI that puts people at the poverty line (per state) instead of below it. I have a feeling even conservatives would support letting the people they consider "leeches" work instead of spending many hours each day looking for work. But maybe I'm being optimistic.
It's benificial to employers because having a surplus of destitute workers who will settle for less than they are worth drives down wages for everyone.
Also consider that this program will provide training and resume ammo for so many people who otherwise couldn't afford said training. In the private sector there's still relatively high demand for the trades with growths faster than average (unsurprisingly solar panel installers and roofers are in even more demand). And these mostly meet or exceed $15/hr.
For education, I hope that mainly means more support for existing teachers.
There's precedence for this to do a lot of good to the population.
You literally can't do this in capitalism.
As soon as the penalty for standing up for your rights in the workplace isn't job loss leading to misery & death there won't be any reason not to demand good working conditions and have your boss stop stealing your wages.
I mean yeah thats what im getting at, when I wrote I didn't have the sources I didn't mean I don't know what I'm talking about I just mean the inevitable "gib source or your wrong" post isn't getting one.
They couldn't even do this under the USSR
Too low unemployment hurts flexibility resulting in a more inefficient economy, and there's also the relationship between unemployment and inflation.
Although you also have to take into account that there are different kinds of unemployment.
This actually interestingly goes beyond most job guarantees too, because those make basic sustenance their goal generally, while this ones goal is to let you thrive, especially if you live somewhere like South Dakota. I really wonder what his plan is for those areas, and also low-productivity industries, although according to the article, this, like most Bernie plans, are pretty scarce on details.
Why does Bernie always campaign for impossible crap like this, it's horrible for the dude's image
I love the guy but he promises shit that's way too ambitious
Bernie, bro, stop Molyneux'ing.
Reminds me of Player Piano and the "fixing crews" in that book. Its gonna be interesting, but Im not sure if something would be possible in a socdem european country, let alone the us.
I'm skeptical. These are the words of a gracchi.
If Bernie planted an acorn in the ground as a kid, the tree would probably be dead by now.
There are a few good reasons to suggest something as radical as a National Employment scheme. It's honestly kind of shocking to see posters here who regularly insult the U.S. as being backwards and unenlightened saying that this is too radical and extreme.
The first is nudging.
When Barack Obama made moves in the opening days of his presidency to implement a, relatively speaking, very conservative National Healthcare Mandate, his party ran leg-and-leg with him up to the finish line. Then, a significant number of members stopped with their tiptoes on the line and kneecapped the Oreo-In-Chief, instead stripping the National Healthcare scheme down to a mere National Insurance Mandate.
It happened so fast and with so much paperwork that the fact that Barack Obama, in essence, vacated his promise was forgotten by virtually both sides of the aisle. Politically, it was a move that looked a lot like a well played game of three-card monte, with the real objective slipping off of the table somewhere in the process and being replaced with a lacklustre copy despite having the needed party-line votes to secure.
By taking a hard-line "socialist" stance on the issue, one that is actually pretty popular, Bernie Sanders won't risk his ideas being nudged "to the center," or anywhere else for that matter. It also shifts the Overton Window, that is, what the acceptable talking points are.
That of course means the hard-line stance won't necessarily win, but that's not the objective. The objective is to get people to argue over a middle ground that is closer to what you actually want. This is a super common strategy at almost every level of negotiation.
This is not to say that Bernie Sanders is playing complex 4D Chess or whatever the stupid meme is now. This a super transparent, typical move that virtually everyone does. Whether it's the Republicans gently reminding folks that they could trigger a government shut-down if they don't get all of their petty, stupid provisos in their spending bill or the Democrats reminding back that they could do the same thing. Neither side wants to do the extreme, stupid thing, but by arguing for it they can move the conversation in the direction they want it to.
The second reason is that the claims that this is "economically impossible" as stem from a place where I'd say that the data doesn't support that "common sense" argument at all. Unless you're relying solely on some gradeschool graph of triangular trade and Supply:Demand, which is about as good a place to argue economics from as the people who say that Governments need to 'balance their checkbooks' and 'carefully watch their revenues.' That is, stupid platitudes which mean nothing.
The New Deal, for instance, is considered one of the most wildly successful economic strategies in American History. It shaped American society and created lasting legacies in terms of our (now crumbling) infrastructure and (now ossifying) social mobility that had never before existed in history. If you've got three generations of Americans in your family, it's not a stretch to say that there is definitely someone in your family who directly benefited from the New Deal.
The arguments against 'full employment' schemes are often supply-side and have to do with how it hurts employers and so-called "job creators." Which I think isn't a problem in a time where Multi-National Corporations control more wealth than ever, pay less actual taxes than ever, and in some cases write the very laws that govern own businesses. It is something we as society could tolerate doing.
Third and finally is that Bernie is not pushing "for the impossible." He's pushing for something that exposes the problems out society has developed for itself. The party that stands for individual freedom has become the party for corporate tax cuts and the party that stands for government oversight has become the party that stands for lasseiz-faire monopolies. Neither had to happen, but because both sold the public on notions of being "strategically viable" and "profit is the American way," we've abandon the things we've known since the 1890's: the large businesses can't be trusted and growth for growth's sake is the philosophy of a cancer cell.
I find it more compelling to study the fact that otherwise 'progressive' people would balk at a real progressive plan. It's telling of what they actually believe in.
Think of Amazon; the company relies on being able to treat you as a robot and boot you out the door at the first sign of dissent.
Every year they vote no on doing their ethics review.
If there was a genuine alternative to working below minimum wage in the warehouse at 90°F while tending to the needs of a vibrating fascist wrist tracker taskmaster then nobody would do it and they'd have to change everything!
Allowing anyone to work for a living wage for the government, under likely decent working conditions, is the perfect baseline for companies in the rest of the country.
I wonder if a socialized living wage would accomplish the same thing, although it makes more sense right now to provide jobs that improve infrastructure.
I hope if america can afford spending billions of dollars on war every year they can afford this
funny how that has been the case forever and yet, here we are
they can afford to erase all traces of poverty from their soil, and it would be beneficial (who'd have thunk it!), but greed and corruption forbids it
That's because a lot of Americans don't actually want people to be equal. They want a selfish advantage that allows them to live a life better than that of their peers.
It's the corollary to 'Fuck you, got mine', 'Fuck you, give me'. It's rather unfortunate too, because increasing everyone's wealth and health leads to a generally better society. They're too shortsighted to see that the true greedy option is to ensure that their fellow citizens are given fair wages and opportunity - because they will directly benefit from those things.
I don't know if I'd be that harsh, but Americans generally do seem to have much more of an aversion to taxes than European countries do. It's almost a little bizarre. The top income tax bracket in my country is 52%. Some Americans would probably have heart attacks seeing rates like that.
I think Americans do generally want a more extensive welfare state, but they're just too used to the relatively low tax rates at this point. I could be wrong on that though, I'm not an expert.
I think part of American's aversion to taxes is that in America you don't really get anything in return for your increased taxes. Our country is so stupid with the way it spends its tax money that people don't feel like there's any justification for raising taxes when we're not getting anything out of it. If America spent less money on the military and buying fancy dining utensils for politicians, and more money on making sure people don't die or get crippled from preventable illnesses, I think people would have a better outlook on taxation.
I think it's wrong to characterize the American mindset as greedy, or malicious avaracious.
Yes, I believe most Americans think of themselves as, "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" as the old axe goes, but I think it has to do with the unique position America has, historically.
In European, Asiatic and Middle Eastern nations, there are literally hundreds of years of class-inequality and revenue disparity that inform the typical social mindset.
In America, income disparity has come cyclically, decades at a time at worst, and in some generations has been almost unimagined. The same goes for social mobility. That is, for many generations of Americans, the American Dream of having a higher standard of living than your parents has been true, over and over again. We Americans learn history, both in an academic sense and a cultural sense, through this lens.
We often overlook or underplay the importance of those who fought for better working conditions, and outright ignore the frankly serendipitous conditions that created our uniquely privileged internal and external economy.
Backmask this with the predominant Protestant equation of Work=Merit=Reward and Slot=Vice=Punishment, and it blends together to make what we have now. Which is to say, people who genuinely believe in spite of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, that working hard, playing by the rules and putting forth good effort will be rewarded with fair, equitable wages.
Let me use my mother as an example.
My mother is an almost stereotypical baby boomer, who never did a day of hard labor in her life, who believes Mike Rowe was right about "sweat debt" and that she paid hers by going to law school. (You can roll your eyes now.)
I took the opportunity to talk to her about Banana Republics recently, after she remarked on how terrible it would be if Peanut Butter rose in price by 4$, when Trump was threatening to go batshit with tariffs. I explained how a lot of the produce we eat, peanut butter included, often comes from under-paid workers who labor in physically devastating conditions.
She agreed that that was terrible. She agreed that people deserve to be paid fairly for their labor.
Then I said, "so maybe it wouldn't be so bad if we paid four more dollars for a jar of peanut butter," to which she unironically replied, "FUCK NO."
A lot like the Patrick's Wallet meme, most Americans do have a functioning sense of logic, and a workable moral compass that can be used to tell them what's right on an intuitive level.
However, multiple lifetimes of economic and social privilege have retarded our ability to take the last step and willfully sacrifice our privileges in exchange for the good of many people. And who can say it's a blame to be borne by any one group or person? Nobody here, I think, would surrender their smart phone, would pay an additional 300$ on computer parts, would willfully see their cost of living double or triple, just so maybe things would get better.
I say maybe because there's also a lot of suspicion, not unfairly held, about large government programs and their efficacy. The amazing endemic corruption within the Military Industrial Complex, the exorbitant excesses that American book keeping often entail, have lead us to believe anything with a big price tag is often just a ruse to bilk people out of their money. Both in the private sector and the public sector.
Maybe that's right, maybe it's not. I've seen enough "big" programs collapse into themselves under scandals, and enough also carry through with acceptable results, to believe it could go either way.
When it comes down to it though, I do think that, if given the chance to choose a politician who would do the right thing, even if it was painful, Americans would. I think we need disabuse ourselves of the illusion that Americans are, as some strange whole, so selfish, deluded and commie-phobic that we wouldn't take a shot at another New Deal if we had the chance. However, as I alluded to in my previous post, I believe a lot of the problem has to deal with a bi-partisan willingness to raid the cabinet for all it's worth until the whole house has burned down, and not just the American people's insolent, short-sighted nature.
What kind of jobs do infrastructure projects create mostly? It seems like an idea out of 1932, where most Americans worked in a blue collar kind of job. Today, many Americans are looking for higher paying white collar jobs. While there's always collateral involved in construction, do these kinds of jobs provide a middle class level of income?
Define middle class level of income.
Depends on the area, really. To be able to afford a 1br apartment in my area would be like $1000/mo (for just rent). Since you should spend like, 1/3 of your net income on rent we can calculate that a good baseline would be like 36,000 after taxes. factor in like ~20% taxes, multiply by 1.25 to get before tax income, then $45,000 sounds reasonable AS A BASELINE so that you can live on your own.
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.