New Economic Perspectives has the article Framing a Job Guarantee. Just to be clear, this is not the same article I discussed in a previous post Framing the Progressive Platform. The current article is specific to the proposal for a federal job guarantee. To the start the discussion, the author dispels the notion that this is somehow “A federal job for everyone?”

The Job Guarantee (JG) program will use federal dollars to pay wages, but few (if any) of the wage earners would become part of a federal bureaucracy that most Americans believe is already over-bloated and inefficient. Think instead of all the private doctors and nurses paid federal dollars to provide health-care services to Medicaid and Medicare patients; think of all the private enterprise farmers, food-processors and distributors who are paid federal dollars to implement the SNAP (food-stamp) program; think of the millions of private defense contractor employees who build ships, planes, and missiles. Ms. McArdle is being disingenuous in planting the idea that everyone who is paid with federal dollars is a federal employee; it’s an idea that immediately discredits the JG program, and it should be proactively discredited itself.

If you are interested in finding out more about a program that could save this economy, society, and nation from fading into the pages of history, I suggest you read the rest of the article. A rational discussion of the pros and cons of the idea will only help to refine it to an even better program that most of us will be able to agree to.