Want To Sound Really Smart About Economic Issues? Read This

When Blue America endorses a candidate, there are several ways we can be helpful to their campaigns, the most obvious being to help them raise campaign funds by connecting them to small dollar campaign contributors. This cycle one of the most valuable other ways we've helped candidates is by connecting them to Stephanie Kelton, America's most brilliant economist. She has been very patient and very helpful with any candidate who wanted to take up he offer. When candidates are advocating Medicare-For-All, the most obvious question they get is "How does that get paid for?" Months after a session with Kelton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a great, to-the-point reply:

Yesterday Ben Walsh did a Q & A session with Kelton for Barrons. It's certainly worth reading the whole thing, but here are some excerpts:

Barron’s: Let’s start from the top. The way the federal government works is it takes in money from taxes, and then it spends it. Right?

Stephanie Kelton: Well, that’s the usual belief. How it really works is that there’s a constant overlap of things happening. That when Congress sits down, in an ideal scenario, the House and the Senate would come up with budgets. And in all likelihood, they won’t match exactly. And so there will be reconciliation. The budget will either pass or not. It gets signed by the president or not. Congress is writing down numbers and saying, “This is our intention, to spend in these amounts.” And the budget authorization is given that allows the heads of these agencies to go out and start hiring, engaging in contracts. It’s the authorization from Congress that provides the funding. That triggers the spending.

The conventional wisdom about deficits is that we should always be worried about them. When do you worry about deficits?

I worry not just about the magnitude, but about the purpose. We could add $1.5 trillion to the deficit over 10 years, as we just did with tax cuts that go disproportionately to people in the top-income distribution, and we could have done, for instance, student debt cancellation at virtually the same price tag. We could have done massive infrastructure investment, or R&D investment.

You can have the same budgetary outcome, but very different economic outcomes, in terms of the potential to boost long-term growth and productivity, impacts on the distribution of income, and so forth. Every economy has its own internal speed limit. You can only absorb so much additional spending at any point in time, given the slack that the economy has at that moment. So can the deficit be too big? Of course! But can it be too small? Yes. And that’s something you rarely hear people say. Or complain about it.

It seems like people forget that balance sheets have two sides.

Government debt is just the money the government spent into the economy and didn’t tax back. That’s all the national debt is. It’s a historical record of all of the times that they made a net deposit, spent more than they taxed out, and the bonds are the difference between those. One of the greatest cons ever perpetrated on the American people is this notion that the national debt belongs to us, that we are responsible in our individual capacity for a share of it.

The national debt clock that counts up exactly how much is owed by every man, woman and child in America!

When I worked on the Hill, one of my favorite exercises was to find elected officials, staffers, and ask them if you had a magic wand, and you could wave it, and eliminate the national debt tomorrow, would you do it? Of course. Who wouldn’t do that? Yes, I mean, the quickest “yes” you ever got in your life.

OK, what if I gave you a different wand, and I told you, you can wave the magic wand, and you can eradicate the world of U.S. Treasuries. There won’t be Treasury notes anymore. They’ll just all be gone. How many members of Congress, would do that?

Zero.

They looked at me with a total blank stare.

Why do you think that people generally, and politicians in particular, are stuck on this notion of the government spending being like a household or an individual?

In some ways, it’s rhetorically convenient. No politician wants to stand, I think, in a town hall meeting and try to explain the intricacies of government finance to constituents. So it’s a convenient narrative to just reinforce the conventional wisdom, the norms of understanding. And I think it also provides political cover.

You advised Sen. Bernie Sanders, and you’re a major proponent of a jobs guarantee, support Medicare for all, free college tuition, and on-- all things the left wants. Do you think that modern monetary theory has an inherent set of politics?

No. When we started undertaking the research for this body of scholarship that’s now dubbed MMT, it was an exercise in trying to understand the monetary system, the way things work. We just wanted to get a better understanding of how the economy works, how fiscal and monetary operations work. At least 90% of MMT is descriptive in nature. But if you believe that the economy chronically operates under its full potential, then it makes sense to look for policy recommendations to make things more efficient, to maximize potential output. And MMT’s not the only school of thought that does that. You see that with classical supply-siders as well. They think the way to squeeze out the last bit of potential is largely through tax cuts and deregulation.

What about Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Argentina, and their debt crises? They exist. Why don’t those things worry you?

Well, the debt crises in those countries are worrying to me. But it’s not a lesson for America. You know, back in 2010, at the height of the European debt crisis, I can remember standing in my kitchen with the TV on, and turning on the news, cooking dinner, and seeing the opening to the nightly news. And it goes, dah, dah, dah, the debt crisis in America. And I go, what debt crisis in America? But that is really what the narrative started to become: This is a warning for America. We need to get our fiscal house in order.

What’s different? Look, Italy in 1995 had a debt-to-GDP ratio of around 120%. Spain in 1995 had a debt ratio of 62%. Greek debt-to-GDP over 100% before joining the euro. These countries were borrowing and spending in a currency that they created. Who remembers the debt crisis in Europe in ’95? There was no debt crisis in ’95, because Italy could always meet every obligation that came due, on time, in full, because it was paying in lira. Where and how else is the lira going to come from but the Italian government?

Do you think openness to MMT and view of deficits and government debt is generational? Do old people just not get it?

I think so. For a certain demographic, the ’70s are still kind of a fresh memory, and you know, waiting in long lines to put gas in the car, high inflation. And so that’s a live memory for some demographic. But young people-- I mean, Obama’s slogan was “Yes we can.” And then all hell breaks loose, and he’s on TV right after the inauguration saying, we ran out of money, so no, we can’t. And then you get Hillary Clinton’s message, which was pretty much, “Yes, we can a little bit.” And millennials see their future, they see climate change, and they take it seriously. They see the cost of college education. They see problems with health care. They can’t get out of the home and start a life. They’re open to a big, ambitious agenda. The threats are real for them.

Support For Job Guarantee Is Growing Rapidly-- Will It Be A Campaign Issue?

A campaign manager I've worked with on a few campaigns in the past has been asking for for the last few days to consider endorsing the candidate he's working with this time. The candidate doesn't seem bad and it's a winnable race. There are 4 Democrats competing for the nomination and the DCCC isn't involved so they all seem somewhat progressive. His candidate doesn't seem financially competitive-- but when have we ever allowed that to determine supporting someone. The newly redrawn district has counties that went for Bernie and counties that backed Hillary. In the general, Trump won-- though not by double digits.

Before agreeing to speak with his candidate-- let's call him Candidate X-- I asked him a few questions... like which primary candidate is most progressive and if Candidate X supports Job Guarantee and College Debt Elimination. His response was that "It is close, but X is more progressive-- his priorities are good jobs, better public schools and quality and affordable health care for everyone-- it is still a Republican district and he will have to pick up Independents and Reasonable Republicans-- so kitchen table issues are the way to go on the surface. Below that-- he is very strongly against gun violence and pro-choice. He put out a statement against Trump's Transgender Ban in the military and is strongly for LGBTQIA+ rights. He has signed the no money from Fossil Fuels Pledge (all four candidates have)-- but X will be signing the End Citizens United No Corporate Money pledge in the next couple of days-- no other candidate has signed it... He supports plan for a job guarantee for people that want a job-- although it is new concept to him and we spoke about it."

Not very convincing. Remember, what Blue America is looking for is courageous principled candidates-- like Kaniela Ing, Jenny Marshall, Alan Grayson and Dan Canon who are going to go to Congress and not worry about voting with conservatives in order to get reelected. Another campaign manager told me last week that his candidate will do it "the West Virginia way, like Joe Manchin does." Good luck with that. It's not what we're looking for-- not even close.

So, he didn't answer the question about College Debt Elimination and didn't have anything much to say about Job Guarantee. So what will he be like in Congress? A scardy cat? Who thinks voting for equal right for gays and willing to vote pro-Choice defines a progressive? Doesn't sound like the kind of champion we're looking for this late in the cycle. But I'll keep an open mind. And send him the Marie Solis report in Newsweek from yesterday: Can A Federal Jobs Guarantee Help Democrats Defeat Trump In 2020? How about elect a Democratic House in 2018? Bernie is about to unveil plans "that would guarantee every American worker a minimum $15 an hour position complete with health care, a retirement plan and the same paid leave benefits granted to federal public-sector employees." Even less credible would-be presidential candidates like Kirsten Gillibrand and Cory Booker are trying to jump on the bandwagon.

There’s already widespread support for a federal jobs guarantee program among voters across the country, and-- most notably-- across the political spectrum, according to Sean McElwee and his colleagues at Data for Progress, a progressive polling and analysis firm. In March, they found that a majority of voters in all 50 states supported a jobs guarantee, even in states that went overwhelmingly to Trump. The state that polled lowest was Utah, where a solid 57-percent majority still said they would favor the proposal.

When researchers at Civis Analytics, another progressive data analytics firm, narrowed the data by voting pattern, they found that 56 percent of those who went from voting for former President Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016 supported a jobs guarantee, and 58 percent of non-voters looked favorably on the idea as well.

... “If we’re speaking strictly about winning campaigns, running on jobs is 100 percent a smart move, and it’s 100 percent what Democrats should be doing,” Sean McElwee, a researcher and co-founder at Data for Progress, told Newsweek. “Democrats can run on jobs without sacrificing other progressive causes.”

McElwee cautioned Democrats against getting too excited about the number of Obama-turned-Trump voters they can win over with the policy-- it’s still modest. But it’s enough to cut a path to victory in 2018, he says.

“If you can get back about one-third of Obama-Trump voters and energize non-voters, there you are,” he said. “You’ve got your House majority.”

Indeed, some who switched their votes from Barack Obama to Trump told Newsweek the idea seemed common-sense.

“If this could help the people get jobs, I support it,” said Eileen Sorokas, from Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, which went to Obama in 2012 but to Trump by 20 points four years later. “I know what it’s like not to have a job-- it’s kind of scary. If it works, I’m all for it.”

Before she retired, Sorokas, now 70, worked at a dress factory that shut down and went overseas in the mid-90s. Her husband Richard worked at Procter & Gamble for over three decades until he retired 17 years ago. He said a jobs guarantee interests him because he’d like to see fewer Americans rely on the country’s welfare system.

“I remember Trump wanted to get people off of welfare, and he said he was going to make jobs for people who want to work” he told Newsweek. “What stuck out for me was getting people off of welfare. I thought that was a great.”

Both Richard and Eileen-- who said they’d been lifelong Democrats-- said they’d consider voting for a member of their party again if they campaigned on a strong jobs platform, like the guaranteed jobs proposal.

But they’re not totally sold yet. After a beat, Richard posed what might just be a multi-billion dollar question: “Where do you get the money?”

Policy research institutes like the Center on Budget and Policy Proposals and the Center for American Progress have priced federal jobs guarantee plans similar to Booker’s and Sanders’s at $543 billion and $158 billion, respectively. The government could fund a jobs program by raising income tax on the rich-- a proposal that is controversial in some circles. But proponents of the policy in the Senate see it as a worthwhile expenditure.

...House candidates are already testing the waters for the 2020 presidential hopefuls. Dan Canon, who’s running in the Democratic primary in Indiana’s 9th District-- which went to Trump by double digits in 2016-- says he’s spoken to hundreds of voters about his proposal for a jobs guarantee, and not one of them has voiced any opposition to the idea.

“A jobs guarantee is good for the economy, it’s good for unemployment and it’s good for infrastructure,” Canon said.

In Canon’s district, home to some of the most rural parts of Indiana, he says voters have two top concerns: jobs and infrastructure. As Canon sees it, fixing the first problem with a jobs guarantee can solve the other. If people need jobs, they can take government-sponsored work fixing the district’s roads, public transit system, energy grids and broadband access, Canon says. The House candidate's proposal, and others like it, harken back to the Works Progress Administration implemented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a program that gave some 8.5 million unemployed Americans jobs building up the country's infrastructure during the Great Depression.

“I have not found a single person in Indiana that disagrees with this idea or thinks it’s a bad one,” Canon told Newsweek. “The only pushback I ever got when presenting people with a jobs guarantee is from political theorists who think the district just isn’t ready. But those tend to be D.C. think-tank types who don’t understand the people on the ground here in Indiana."

We asked some the other candidates Blue America has endorsed how they speak about Job Guarantee to the voters. Hawaii candidate Kaniela Ing told us that "America’s promise has always been clear-- work hard and your family will prosper. Today, too many hard-working Americans feel that our leaders have gone bad on that promise. I talk to folks who tell me everyday, they grind and sweat, but struggle to get by. Wages are stagnant, unemployment and underemployment are rising, the threats of automation and globalization are becoming real, all while costs are skyrocketing. But just take a walk outside and look around at all the work that needs to be done in America. There are bridges to be built, highways needing repair, kids to be taught, aging folks needing care, oceans to be cleaned, trees to be planted. But private markets fall short. For every job opening in America, four people are gunning for it. This pits worker against worker and creates a power imbalance between workers and their bosses. It’s too risky for a worker to stand up to wage theft, inhumane working conditions, or sexual harassment, when they know there’s nowhere else to go. Our elected representatives must stop pretending that everything is okay, and that the job market will some home fix itself. It’s time for real solutions that will actually help working families across America. It’s time for a new New deal. Since the start of my campaign, I’ve been leading with a universal job guarantee, and I ask other progressive candidates to join me. Let’s remind the establishment that the ability to work for a livable wage is a human right that should be afforded to all. In these uncertain times, progressives will lead with real solutions that offer hope to the many, and just the privileged few."

Ellen Lipton is the former state legislator and progressive Democrat running for the open seat in the suburbs north of Detroit. She's interested in Bernie's Jobs Guarantee ideas and told us that "the federal government has been at the mercy of corporate-controlled lobbyists for long enough. How long are we going to allow them to offer the same tired economic policy of tax cuts for the phantom 'job-creators?' How about trying something that actually has a track record of working-- direct federal investment in people rather than profits. A guaranteed jobs program would put people to work on everything from infrastructure to IT, renewable energy to healthcare and social work-- the possibilities are endless."

Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, the Blue America-endorsed candidate running in the open Albuquerque district, is also a big fan of Job Guarantee. This is what she told us some time ago: "I believe that all human beings deserve to live in dignity, and that as part of that we build a government that ensures a well-paying job to each and every individual. Imagine if we guaranteed to all human beings a well-paying job with a livable wage that allows for healthcare, housing, transportation, food, and ultimately the dignity of work? What it would mean for our communities, poverty, racial and gender equality? Well, we've done parts of this before with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the New Deal era. Imagine a program that achieves delivering well-paying work to all individuals, all while overhauling our nation's infrastructure and educational systems. It has the potential to breakdown the entrenched racial and gender-based inequality that exists in our labor force, and enshrines the ideal that all Americans who want a good job will have one. It assures that the dignity of a well-paying job is not just for a plurality of Americans, but for all who seek it. In an increasingly evolving economy, it's important that our government think creatively about the future of our labor force, and ensure that people's needs are put first in the changing labor economy."

Like Dan Canon, Jenny Marshall's North Carolina primary is May 8 sees the idea of Job Guarantee as something relatively easy to explain to voters. (Maybe that's because she's a school teacher.) She's campaigning for the seat held by a multimillionaire, Virginia Foxx, who has never exhibited any interest whatsoever in giving a hand to working families. "People," Jenny told us," want to work and give back to their communities in real tangible ways. They also want to provide a decent, secure life for their family. Think of all the New Deal programs such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Works Progress Administration that helped put people to work and which began to pull us out of the Great Depression in the 1930's. While those programs did not lift all out of abject poverty it did jump start our economy in a way that can still be witnessed today. Frankly, our infrastructure is long outdated and our national parks and memorials need tending to. Here in the 5th district we have national forest that needs trail cleanup, buildings that need to be repaired and programs that need to be staffed. We need to repair dams, bridges and other infrastructure projects. People need jobs and ones that pay a living wage. Why not offer work that would put an investment back into our communities?"

Winning In 2020-- Something Bold... Or More Status Quo?

King of Diamonds by Nancy Ohanian

University of Pennsylvania professor Diana Mutz published a study Monday that asserts that "Fear of losing their privileged status in America and the world motivated many 2016 voters, notably whites, men, and Christians. She calls into question the whole theory that it was anger rather than fear that motivatived Trump voters-- that the white working class, having faced job losses and stagnant wages under Obama, voted with their pocketbooks when they chose Señor Trumpanzee.

Mutz's point is "that many Trump voters are feeling left behind, but not for reasons related to personal financial problems or economic anxiety about the future. Based on survey data from a nationally representative panel of the same 1,200 American voters polled in both 2012 and 2016... Mutz found that traditionally high-status Americans, namely whites, feel their status in America and the world is threatened by America's growing racial diversity and a perceived loss of US global dominance. Under threat by these engines of change, America's socially dominant groups increased their support in 2016 for the candidate who most emphasised reestablishing status hierarchies of the past... [She] followed voters over a four-year period to assess their changing views of trade, the threat posed by China, their sense of group threat, and perceptions of their own personal finances, as well as experiences of unemployment and the economic conditions in their local communities. As in previous elections, most voters in 2016 simply supported the candidate of the same party that they voted for in 2012. But the key to understanding the 2016 outcome lies in what changed from 2012 to 2016 that predicted changing vote choice.

Trump's rhetoric during the 2016 election capitalised on the fears of Americans who currently enjoy dominant status in society, most notably those who were white, Christian, male, or some combination of the three. Many of those Americans, Mutz found, switched from voting for the Democrat in 2012 to the Republican in 2016. Particularly those who found societal changes threatening voted for Trump in an effort to maintain their perceived social dominance in the country and the world.

The status threat experienced by many Americans was not only about their place in American society. In contrast to the conventional wisdom in political science that "voting ends at the water's edge"-- that international affairs don't matter to how people vote-- Mutz found that Americans feel increasingly threatened by the interdependence of the United States with other countries.

  Their sense that America is no longer the dominant superpower it once was influenced their vote in 2016.

"Political uprisings are often about downtrodden groups rising up to assert their right to better treatment and more equal life conditions relative to high-status groups," Mutz writes. "The 2016 election, in contrast, was an effort by members of already dominant groups to assure their continued dominance and by those in an already powerful and wealthy country to assure its continued dominance."

Interestingly, Mutz found that Americans' own positions on issues such as trade, China, and immigration did not change dramatically between 2012 and 2016. In fact, Americans on the whole became more open to citizenship for undocumented immigrants than in 2012.

What did shift, however, were their perceptions of where the Republican candidate stood in 2016 relative to 2012, particularly on issues such as free trade and the threat posed by China. The greater the distance voters perceived between their own positions and those of the Democratic candidate on these issues, and the closer they were to the Republican candidate's position, the more likely they were to switch their votes from how they had voted in 2012.

Despite exhaustive data analysis, the study did not show any relationship between financial hardship and voting for Trump. In addition, those whose financial situations declined between 2012 and 2016 relative to others' economic well-being were no more likely to switch to Trump.

..."The 2016 election was a result of anxiety about dominant groups' future status rather than a result of being overlooked in the past," she writes. "In many ways, a sense of group threat is a much tougher opponent than an economic downturn, because it is a psychological mindset rather than an actual event or misfortune. Given current demographic trends within the United States, minority influence will only increase with time, thus heightening this source of perceived status threat."

Her findings help explain the large numbers of white voters nationally where counties didn't just pick Bernie over Hillary but picked Bernie (in the primaries) over Trump. Some examples:

In Boone County, West Virginia, Bernie beat Hillary 52% to 26.8% but he also beat Trump on primary day 24,410 to 1,388. It was very similar in many counties in the state, like Marion Co., where Bernie beat Hillary 52.4% to 35.0% and also beat Trump 5,324 to 4,035; Mingo Co., Bernie 48.3% and Hillary 23.7% and Bernie 2,425 votes to Trump's 1,161; Calhoun County, where Bernie beat Hillary 60.6% to 23.6% and beat Trump 803 to 480; Logan Co.-- Bernie 50.5% to Hillary 23.5% while Bernie took 3,201 votes to Trump's 1,665; Fayette Co., where it was 52.3% Bernie to 33.8% Hillary and 3,585 Bernie to 2,683 Trump; McDowell Co., where it was Bernie 55.5%, Hillary 29.9% and Bernie 1,453 to Trump's 760; and Monongalia Co., Bernie 57.6% to Hillary's 35.3% and Bernie 8,096 to Trump's 5,571. And, of course it wasn't just West Virginia:

• Dupage, Illinois- Bernie 52%, Hillary 47%; Bernie beating Trump 65,159 to 45,1313
• Kane, IL- Bernie 56%, Hillary 43%; Bernie beating Trump 31,085 to 21,605
• Champaign, IL- Bernie 66%, Hillary 34%; Bernie beating Trump 20,581 to 7,645
• Jackson, IL- Bernie 62%, Hillary 38%; Bernie beating Trump 4,656 to 2,215
• DeKalb, IL- Bernie 66%, Hillary 31%; Bernie beating Trump 8,315 to 5,139
• statewide in New Hampshire- Bernie 60%, Hillary 38%; Bernie beating Trump 151,584 to 100,405
• Kalamazoo Co., Michigan- Bernie 61%, Hillary 38%; Bernie beating Trump 20,145 to 9,104
• Ingham Co., MI- Bernie 55%, Hillary 44%; Bernie beating Trump 22,909 to 8,056
• Isabella Co., MI- Bernie 66%, Hillary 33%; Bernie beating Trump 4,024 to 2,180
• Kent, Co., MI- Bernie 62.5%, Hillary 37.3%; Bernie beating Trump 43,375 to 22,742
• Grand Traverse Co., MI- Bernie 65%, Hillary 33%; Bernie beating Trump 8,091 to 5,891
• Dane Co, Wisconsin- Bernie 62.6%, Hillary 37.3%; Bernie beating Trump 102,585 to 20,884
• Los Crosse Co, WI- Bernie 63%, Hillary 37%; Bernie beating Trump 15,139 to 8,271
• Bayfield, Co., WI- Bernie 63.5%, Hillary 36.2%; Bernie beating Trump 8,315 to 5,139
• Rock, WI- Bernie 60%, Hillary 39%; Bernie beating Trump 17,337 to 10,264
• Eau Claire Co., WI- Bernie 64%, Hillary 36%; Bernie beating Trump 13,058 to 6,505
• Portage Co., WI- Bernie 65%, Hillary 35%; Bernie beating Trump 9,348 to 5,112
• Kenosha Co., WI- Bernie 57%, Hillary 42%; Bernie beating Trump 14,612 to 11,139

That was just a sample where voters wanted change-- and preferred the kind of change Bernie was offering over the bullshit Trump was offering. We've been talking a lot here about Job Guarantee, a major plank in the Bernie platform for 2020. This week, Jeff Stein tried fleshing it out a bit for Washington Post readers. "Sanders's jobs guarantee," he wrote, "would fund hundreds of projects throughout the United States aimed at addressing priorities such as infrastructure, heath care, the environment, education and other goals. Under the job guarantee, every American would be entitled to a job under one of these projects or receive job training to be able to do so." Bernie's going to unveil his plan-- which, predictably, is opposed by Republicans and by Democrats from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- soon.

Job guarantee advocates say their plan would drive up wages by dramatically increasing competition for workers, ensuring corporations have to offer more generous salaries and benefits if they want to keep their employees from working for the government. Supporters say it would also reduce racial inequality, since black workers face unemployment at about twice the rates of white workers, as well as gender inequality, since many iterations of the plan call for the expansion of federal child-care work.

“The goal is to eliminate working poverty and involuntary unemployment altogether,” said Darrick Hamilton, an economist at the New School who has advocated for a jobs guarantee program along with Stony Brook University’s Stephanie Kelton and a group of left-leaning economists at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. “This is an opportunity for something transformative, beyond the tinkering we’ve been doing for the last 40 years, where all the productivity gains have gone to the elite of society.”

...It’s not clear exactly what would happen to a worker who violated the terms of employment. The plan suggests creating a Division of Progress Investigation to “take disciplinary action if needed,” leaving authority to the head of the Labor Department. Aides to Sanders stress that the policy details remain in their initial stages.

Proponents trace the idea back to the New Deal Era, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt pitched a “Second Bill of Rights” to Congress in 1944. First on the list: the “right to a useful and remunerative job.”

“This is not a radical idea,” Hamilton said. “It was well-couched in the Democratic platform that existed during its heyday. I’m glad Democrats are trending back to their roots.”

The Government Has A Job To Do-- Creating Full Employment... And It's Been Failing At It

There have been rumors circulating for months that one of the planks of Bernie's 2020 platform will be Job Guarantee. This week the Levy Institute at Bard College published a paper that could well be the intellectual underpining of that plank, Public Service Employment-- A Path To Full Employment by distinguished economists L. Randall Wray, Stephanie A. Kelton, Pavlina R. Tcherneva, Scott Fullwiler, and Flavia Dantas. It's well worth reading the entire report (at the link above). This is the executive summary:

Despite headline-grabbing reports of a healthy US labor market, millions of Americans remain unemployed and underemployed. It is a problem that plagues our economy in good times and in bad-- there are never enough jobs available for all who want to work. The problem is most acute for women, youths, blacks, and Latinos, although research also finds a persistent lack of employment for large numbers of working-age men. This report asks a set of big questions: What if we sought to eliminate involuntary unemployment across all demographic groups and geographic regions, by directly creating jobs in the communities where they are needed through a federally funded Public Service Employment program? How could such a radical transformation of the labor market be implemented? What would it cost, and what would it mean for the US economy?

A number of important implications emerge from this analysis. Joblessness, defined as the inability to secure a job at a living wage ($15 per hour), can be eliminated in every corner of America for every eligible person who desires to work. With a standing job offer-- a “public option”-- available at all times, the US labor market would transition to a permanent state of true full employment. Millions of American families would be lifted out of poverty, and the economy would grow as the benefits of the program spill over into the private sector. Perhaps most astonishingly, this can all be done without the need to raise taxes and without creating an inflation problem.

We propose the creation of a Public Service Employment (PSE) program that would offer a job at a living wage to all who are ready and willing to work. This is a “job guarantee” program that provides employment to all who need work by drawing from the pool of the otherwise unemployed during recessions and shrinking as private sector employment recovers. Federally funded but with a decentralized administration, the PSE program would pay $15 per hour for both full- and part-time positions and offer benefits that include health insurance and childcare. In addition to guaranteeing access to work on projects that serve a public purpose, the PSE program establishes effective minimum standards for wages and benefits.

We have simulated the economic impact over a ten- year period of implementing the PSE program beginning in 2018Q1. Drawing from the unemployed, underemployed, and those who are out of the labor force, the program would attract roughly 15 million people into the PSE workforce, based on our higher- bound estimates of likely program participants. While the report also presents lower-bound estimates, the results highlighted here correspond to this higher- bound scenario:

•  Real, inflation-adjusted GDP (2017Q4 dollar values) would be boosted by $560 billion per year on average, once the PSE program is at full strength (from 2020 to 2027).

•  The economic stimulus generated by the PSE program would also increase private sector employment by up to an additional 4.2 million private sector jobs relative to the baseline, due to the “multiplier effects” of the program.

•  Even though it boosts GDP by over $500 billion per year, adds more than 19 million private and public service jobs, and raises wages nationwide above $15 per hour, the program’s impact on inflation is minor: the boost to inflation peaks at 0.74 percentage points higher than the baseline projection and then progressively falls to a negligible 0.09 percentage points higher than the baseline by the end of the simulation period.

•  The program’s net impact on the federal budget averages 1.53 percent of GDP in the first five years of the program (2018–22) and 1.13 percent of GDP in the last five years (2023–27). These net budgetary impacts could be significantly overestimated, since the simulation makes very cautious assumptions about offsetting reductions in Medicaid and Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) expenditures that would result from higher employment and wages.
•  State-level government budgets are improved by a total of $53 billion per year by boosting employment and growth.

•  Based on the demographics of estimated PSE participants, the program would disproportionately benefit women and minorities.

•  One full-time worker in the PSE program could lift a family of up to five out of poverty. With one full-time and one part-time worker, a family of eight could rise above the poverty line.

•  In addition to these measured benefits, the PSE program would lower spending by all levels of government, as well as by businesses and households, on a range of costly problems created by unemployment. It is possible that the program would “pay for itself” in terms of savings due to reduced crime, improved health, greater social and economic stability, and larger reductions in Medicaid and EITC expenditures than those assumed in the simulations.

•  The projects undertaken in every community would provide visible benefits, meeting specific local needs through work that involves caring for people, strengthening communities, and protecting and renewing the environment. This report develops a blueprint for the design, jobs, and implementation of the PSE proposal for the United States.


Unemployment, hidden and official, with all of its attendant social harms, is a policy choice. The results in this report lend more weight to the argument that it is a policy choice we need no longer tolerate. True full employment is both achievable and sustainable.


Alan Grayson is running for Congress again. This is right up his alley. Yesterday he told us that "During the worst of the Great Recession, with unemployment in double digits, I pointed out that the Government could hire every single unemployed person, paying them all $15 per hour, and that would cost around half of the military budget. Today, it would cost barely a quarter of the military budget or, alternatively, right around the cost of the Trump tax cuts for the rich. And if we did, then America would no longer be a country of cheap labor and debt slavery."

Jenny Marshall is the progressive candidate running for the 5th district in North Carolina, currently held by Virginia Foxx-- a big waste of a seat. This morning, Jenny told us that "as she has "traveled around the district what I have found is that people want to work. They want a job that pays the bills. The jobs guarantee would provide work to those who need it in places and spaces where they could have a huge impact in empowering their community and providing much needed labor. I have been talking to people in the recent weeks about this proposal and people are excited about it. They start rattling off places that need help and things that need fixed. With a jobs guarantee, we could tackle those and so much more. A job gives a person autonomy, dignity and builds community. The jobs guarantee is a win-- win situation."

Job Guarantee, Good-- Guaranteed Basic Income, Scam

Elizabeth Esty is a New Dem backbencher from northwestern Connecticut (CT-05)— Meriden, Waterbury, Danbury, New Farfield, Mew Milford, Salibury… Obama won the district both times (with 56.4% in 2008 and 53.5% in 2012) and Hillary beat Trump 49.9% to 45.8%. The district’s PVI is D+2, least blue in the state. Esty is a relatively conservative Democrat, an EMILY’s List politician, who won Chris Murphy’s seat in 2012 when he ran for the U.S. Senate. She won the primary by beating progressive House Speaker Chris Donovan in a 3-way race, a real tragedy since he’s a proven leader and she’s a big waste of a seat, a seat she’s being forced to vacate after being exposed for creating a horrible workplace by retaining a chief of staff, a violent sexual harasser for three months after she first learned of the allegations in 2016. Among the Democrats eyeing the race to replace her are Harvey Weinstein buddy Dan Roberti, Waterbury Mayor Neil O'Leary, state Rep. Liz Linehan of Cheshire and former state Sen. Dante Bartolomeo of Meriden are considered top contenders. Luckily for the Democrats, the filing deadline is June 8 and the primary is August 14.

Not much of a news story, right? But it’s getting a thousand times more coverage than Chris Hedges’ TruthDig column about, a scam being pushed by oligarchs, guaranteed basic income, which is a thousand times more consequential. Bernie, the most important advocate of Job Guarantee has been warning his supporters that UBI is a scam. Hedges agrees. He wrote that “A number of the reigning oligarchs-- among them Mark Zuckerberg (net worth $64.1 billion), Elon Musk (net worth $20.8 billion), Richard Branson (net worth $5.1 billion) and Stewart Butterfield (net worth $1.6 billion)-- are calling for a guaranteed basic income. It looks progressive. They couch their proposals in the moral language of caring for the destitute and the less fortunate. But behind this is the stark awareness, especially in Silicon Valley, that the world these oligarchs have helped create is so lopsided that future consumers, plagued by job insecurity, substandard wages, automation and crippling debt peonage, will be unable to pay for the products and services offered by the big corporations.”

The oligarchs do not propose structural change. They do not want businesses and the marketplace regulated. They do not support labor unions. They will not pay a living wage to their bonded labor in the developing world or the American workers in their warehouses and shipping centers or driving their delivery vehicles. They have no intention of establishing free college education, universal government health or adequate pensions. They seek, rather, a mechanism to continue to exploit desperate workers earning subsistence wages and whom they can hire and fire at will. The hellish factories and sweatshops in China and the developing world where workers earn less than a dollar an hour will continue to churn out the oligarchs’ products and swell their obscene wealth. America will continue to be transformed into a deindustrialized wasteland. The architects of our neofeudalism call on the government to pay a guaranteed basic income so they can continue to feed upon us like swarms of longnose lancetfish, which devour others in their own species.

“Increasing the minimum wage or creating a basic income will amount to naught if hedge funds buy up foreclosed houses and pharmaceutical patents and raise prices (in some cases astronomically) to line their own pockets out of the increased effective demand exercised by the population,” David Harvey writes in “Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason.” “Increasing college tuitions, usurious interest rates on credit cards, all sorts of hidden charges on telephone bills and medical insurance could steal away the benefits. A population might be better served by strict regulatory intervention to control these living expenses, to limit the vast amount of wealth appropriation occurring at the point of realisation. It is not surprising to find there is strong sentiment among the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley to also support basic minimum income proposals. They know their technologies are putting people out of work by the millions and that those millions will not form a market for their products if they have no income.”

The call for a guaranteed basic income is a classic example of Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci’s understanding that when capitalists have surplus capital and labor they use mass culture and ideology, in this case neoliberalism, to reconfigure the habits of a society to absorb the surpluses.

…This phase of capitalism ended once industry moved overseas and wages stagnated or declined. The well-paying unionized jobs disappeared. Jobs became menial and inadequately compensated. Poverty expanded. The oligarchs began to mine government social services, including education, health care, the military, intelligence gathering, prisons and utilities such as electricity and water, for profit. As a publication of the San Francisco Federal Reserve reportedly noted, the country-- and by extension the oligarchs-- could no longer get out of crises “by building houses and filling them with things.” The United States shifted in the 1970s from what the historian Charles Maier called an “empire of production” to “an empire of consumption.” In short, we began to borrow to maintain a lifestyle and an empire we could no longer afford.

Profit in the “empire of consumption” is extracted not by producing products but by privatizing and pushing up the costs of the basic services we need to survive and allowing banks and hedge funds to impose punishing debt peonage on the public and gamble on tech, student debt and housing bubbles. The old ideology of the New Deal, of government orchestrating huge social engineering projects under the Public Works Administration or in the War on Poverty, was replaced by a new ideology to justify another form of predatory capitalism.

In Harvey’s book A Brief History of Neoliberalism he defines neoliberalism as “a project to achieve the restoration of class power” in the wake of the economic crisis of the 1970s and what the political scientist Samuel Huntington said was America’s “excess of democracy” in the 1960s and the 1970s. It achieved its aim.

Neoliberalism, Harvey wrote, is “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”

American oligarchs discredited the populist movements of the 1960s and 1970s that had played a vital role in forcing government to carry out programs for the common good and restricting corporate pillage. They demonized government, which as John Ralston Saul writes, “is the only organized mechanism that makes possible that level of shared disinterest known as the public good.” Suddenly-- as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, two of the principal political proponents of neoliberalism, insisted-- government was the problem. The neoliberal propaganda campaign successfully indoctrinated large segments of the population to call for their own enslavement.

The ideology of neoliberalism never made sense. It was a con. No society can effectively govern itself by basing its decisions and policies on the dictates of the marketplace. The marketplace became God. Everything and everyone was sacrificed on its altar in the name of progress. Social inequality soared. Amid the destruction, the proponents of neoliberalism preached the arrival of a new Eden once we got through the pain and disruption. The ideology of neoliberalism was utopian, if we use the word “utopia” as Thomas More intended—the Greek words for “no” and “place.” “To live within ideology, with utopian expectations, is to live in no place, to live in limbo,” Saul writes in “The Unconscious Civilization.” “To live nowhere. To live in a void where the illusion of reality is usually created by highly sophisticated rational constructs.”

Corporations used their wealth and power to make this ideology the reigning doctrine. They established well-funded centers of propaganda such as The Heritage Foundation, took over university economic departments and amplified the voices of their courtiers in the media. Those who questioned the doctrine were cast out like medieval heretics, their careers blocked and their voices muted or silenced. The contradictions, lies and destruction within neoliberal ideology were ignored by those who dominated the national discourse, leading to mounting frustration and rage among a populace that had been abandoned and betrayed.

The propagandists for neoliberalism blamed the other-- Muslims, undocumented workers, African-Americans, gays, feminists, liberals, intellectuals and, of course, government-- for the downward spiral. Politicians who served the interests of the corporate oligarchs told dispossessed white workers their suffering was caused by the ascendancy of these marginalized groups and a cultural assault on their national identity and values, not corporate pillage. It was only a matter of time before this lie spawned the xenophobic, racist hate speech that dominates American political life and led to the rise of imbecilic and dangerous demagogues such as Donald Trump.

“Each of Globalization’s strengths has somehow turned out to have an opposing meaning,” Saul writes in The Collapse of Globalization and the Reinvention of the World. “The lowering of national residency requirements for corporations has morphed into a tool for massive tax evasion. The idea of a global economic system mysteriously made local poverty seem unreal, even normal. The decline of the middle class-- the very basis of democracy-- seemed to be just one of those things that happen, unfortunate but inevitable. That the working class and lower middle class, even parts of the middle class, could only survive with more than one job per person seemed to be the expected punishment for not keeping up. The contrast between unprecedented bonuses for mere managers at the top and the four-job family below them seemed inevitable in a globalized world. For two decades an elite consensus insisted that unsustainable third-world debts could not be put aside in a sort of bad debt reserve without betraying Globalism’s essential principles and moral obligations, which included unwavering respect for the sanctity of international contracts. It took the same people about two weeks to abandon sanctity and propose bad debt banks for their own far larger debts in 2009.”

The oligarchs mask their cruelty and greed with an empty moralism. They claim to champion women’s rights, diversity and inclusivity, as long as women and people of color serve the corporate neoliberal project. An example of this moralism occurred last Tuesday when NPR’s Ari Shapiro interviewed Lyft co-founder and President John Zimmer and former Obama administration official Valerie Jarrett, a member of the company’s board, about diversity and gender equality in the workplace. Shapiro asked about Lyft offering free rides to those marching against gun violence and donating to the ACLU.

“We serve our drivers, we serve our passengers, and we serve the employees that work for us,” Zimmer said in the interview. “And when it comes to [resisting gun] violence, when it comes to equality, those are things that we’re going to stand up for.”

America’s “gig economy,” as I wrote last week in my column, is a new form of serfdom. Corporations such as Lyft use lobbyists and campaign donations to free themselves from regulatory control. They force poorly paid temporary workers, who lack benefits, to work 16 hours a day in a race to the bottom. This neoliberal economic model destroys regulated taxi and livery services, forcing drivers who were once able to make a decent income into poverty, bankruptcy, foreclosures, evictions and occasionally suicide. By fighting gender, sexual and racial inequality in the workplace rather than economic inequality, by denouncing mass shootings rather than out-of-control police violence and mass incarceration, these corporations hide their complicity in societal disintegration. Their empty moralism and faux compassion is an updated version of the publicity stunt that John D. Rockefeller, whose personal fortune was $900 million in 1913, or $189.6 billion in today’s terms, used when he handed out shiny new dimes to strangers.

Neoliberalism heralds a return to the worst days of unregulated capitalism, after the Industrial Revolution when workers were denied a living wage and decent, safe working conditions. Oligarchs have not changed. They are out for themselves. They do not see government as an institution to defend and promote the rights and needs of citizens. They see it as an impediment to unrestricted exploitation and profit. Human beings, to oligarchs, are commodities. They are used to increase wealth and then discarded. Oligarchs don’t propose programs such as a guaranteed basic income unless they intend to profit from it. This is how they are wired. Don’t be fooled by the grins and oily promises of these human versions of the Cheshire Cat. The object is to spread confusion while they increase levels of exploitation.

“Alice asked the Cheshire Cat, who was sitting in a tree, ‘What road do I take?’ ” Lewis Carroll wrote. “The cat asked, ‘Where do you want to go?’ ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the cat, ‘it really doesn’t matter, does it?’”

The longer the elites keep us in darkness with their ideological tricks and empty moralism, the longer we refuse to mobilize to break their grip on power, the worse it will get.

In a brilliant new working paper, Job Guarantee: Design, Jobs, and Implementation, Pavlina Tcherneva answers the questions “Why don’t we just give people cash assistance instead?” and “Isn’t universal basic income (UBI) a better program?”

Even if UI were increased, other cash assistance programs were strengthened, and a form of basic income guarantee were implemented, people would still want jobs.

Research indicates that the nonpecuniary costs of unemployment (85–93 percent) far outweigh the pecuniary costs (15–7 percent). This suggests that interventions that are based on providing income alone will not be successful. People reap a great many benefits from working; income is but one of them. Decent work at decent pay brings significant mental and physical health benefits, it increases and deepens one’s social capital, strengthens educational and labor market outcomes of other family members, and offers institutional support and economic opportunities not available to those outside the labor market, to name just a few.

While there are many good reasons why some people cannot or should not work and why other public policies should be designed to offer them economic security, income assistance does not solve the problem of involuntary unemployment.

There are reasons to doubt the effectiveness of UBI programs. The first is that they do not address unemployment and the associated social and personal costs. Experiments around the world show that, even in places where some form of UBI has been implemented, many people still seek but are unable to find paid employment.

Secondly, UBI in and of itself does not guarantee access to needed real resources. Working families today have trouble finding adequate housing, care, afterschool programs, clean public spaces, etc., even if they already have above-poverty incomes.

The JG guarantees both: the income and the public goods and services that are currently in short supply. The JG is a type of guaranteed income, except it guarantees both the income-- through public service employment-- and the provisioning of the very goods and services communities need.

I had a discussion with Bernie's economic advisor and Stony Brook professor, Stephanie Kelton, about this today. “The Silicon Valley version of a UBI is obviously a self-serving Trojan horse,” she told me. "Money for Nothing and the [shredding of the last vestiges of the New Deal and Great Society] for free.” 

Whenever someone pitches a basic income guarantee, ask them: (1) Is it genuinely universal?-- ie does everyone get the same no-strings-attached payment? (2) Is it enough to live on without working? (3) How do you “pay for it?” Chances are, it’s a scheme to enrich those at the top by eviscerating the safety net-- that’s their “pay-for-- under the guise of “efficiency” or some other bogus neoliberal label. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Stephanie introduced me to Geoff Coventry last January and he did a guest post on Modern Monetary Theory. He’s a serial entrepreneur and a member of the Patriotic Millionaires, a group dedicated to ending the destabilizing concentration of wealth and power in America. I asked him to comment on this one as well. “We all recognize,” he told me this morning, “that there are some people in society who should be the beneficiary of income support, including children & students, the elderly, those who cannot or will not work for various reasons. But we should also recognize that there are many who want to work for a living but are denied this opportunity to participate in the economy, contribute their skills, and provide a living for themselves and their families. The Job Guarantee specifically addresses this need by providing local work for any who seek it but who are not currently needed for any private or public sector labor needs. It also provides a floor to what a full time job deserves in terms of wages, benefits, and working conditions. Proponents of a UBI but not a job guarantee are suggesting those who want a job should not receive a job but instead receive income, effectively denying these citizens their right to work.

“In addition to meeting a basic need of society, a well designed job guarantee can play a key role in reshaping our economy in ways that reduce discrimination, wage suppression, inequality, and structural poverty. The formerly incarcerated, the long-term unemployed, those living in abandoned towns and communities all need targeted opportunities to learn skills, become reconnected in their communities, and contribute to meeting the needs unique to their locale. Income alone does not connect people together. Income alone does not help people gain skills and confidence by working with others. It does not provide pride of having done something in the community that matters to their friends and neighbors. It doesn’t set a new bar for company wages, benefits and working conditions. A job guarantee is a foundational policy for those who seek to restructure our economy to one that works for all, raises the standard of living for those who most need it, and providing a path for both personal and community development.”

 

The Climate For Federal Job Guarantee: NOW

Political Unrest by Nancy Ohanian

Charlie Cook doesn't go out on a limb with his electoral predictions. Year after year, cycle after cycle, he plays it very, very safe. This year, though, even he can't deny what's headed towards the congressional Republicans. This week he penned a column that explains-- in part-- why there may be as many as 70 or 80 fewer Republicans in the House in 2019 as there are now: Evidence Grows that Trump Is Dragging the GOP Down. The massive swing in PA-18 that swept Conor Lamb into office in the heart of Trump country is, he wrote "just the most-recent evidence of the Democratic tidal wave forming this midterm election cycle."

The outcome in the 18th was a continuation of a pattern seen in seven special House elections last year: Democrats running 6 to 12 points better than what The Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voting Index would suggest they should in those districts, averaging an 8-point over-performance. Similarly, there was a 15-point over-performance for Democrat Doug Jones in December’s Senate victory in Alabama. Individually, each of these examples could be explained away, or rationalized, but collectively they tell a clear story.

Cook Political Report House Editor David Wasserman notes that there are 118 GOP House members-- almost half of the House Republican Conference-- in districts with a PVI score worse for the GOP than the one Lamb just won. Almost three-quarters-- 174 out of the current 238 to be exact-- of GOP members were not elected before 2007, meaning they have never been re-elected in a year with significant headwinds, like those last experienced by Republicans in 2006. Republicans benefitted from tailwinds in President Obama’s 2010 and 2014 midterm years. Any Republican attempting to dismiss the severity of this pattern should remember Pennsylvania GOP Rep. Charlie Dent’s line that “denial is not just a river in Egypt; this is a real problem.”

These results fit squarely with what history tells us about midterm election losses for the party that holds the White House, particularly when a president has low job-approval ratings, as President Trump’s are. This should not just be a concern for Beltway Republicans, but in state races up and down the ballot as well. Earlier this week, this column reported statistics compiled by the National Conference of State Legislatures’ Tim Storey, that in 27 of the past 29 midterm elections, the party in the White House lost state legislative seats. Storey, the undisputed nonpartisan authority on state elections, also calculates that the president’s party has not gained governorships in 26 out of 29 midterm elections since 1902, averaging a net loss of 4.5 governorships in these midterm election cycles.

...A lot of veteran Republican strategists and consultants are quietly warning GOP candidates of what lays ahead for them. Some are not so quiet. Former National Republican Congressional Committee Executive Director Liesl Hickey, one of the sharpest GOP operatives around, laid it out in three tweets on Wednesday:

We have a growing economy, with low inflation; businesses busy hiring, expanding, and investing; and an unemployment rate of 4.1 percent for five consecutive months, a 17-year low. Keeping in mind that most new jobs are created by small business, the National Federation of Independent Business’ small-business-owner optimism index is at a 35-year high. The just-released Business Roundtable survey of 137 CEOs of the largest corporations in America shows the best economic outlook in the survey’s 15-year history. And yet we have a president with toxic poll numbers who is becoming a millstone around the necks of Republicans in even some of the most GOP-leaning states and districts in the country.

Conor Lamb won despite being a shit candidate. And it was just because ne was running against an ever shittier candidate. Lamb didn't run against Trump and Trumpism. He didn't have to. The big swing in PA-18 wasn't a swing towards Lamb or a swing away from Saccone. It was part of the national disgust with Trump. And it was big enough to sweep-- albeit barely-- a miserable Blue Dog into Congress and get Beltway idiots to declare him a superstar and big enough to allow the DCCC to insist that the way to win is by running more shit Blue Dogs and New Dems from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, just what they would have done whether Lamb existed or not.

Eric Levitz doesn't have the Beltway cred of a Cook or a Wasserman. but his analysis (in New York Magazine) Thursday was better.. and, for Democratic congressional candidates, more useful.

Last week, a self-styled moderate Democrat won a congressional race in the heart of Trump Country-- and the last-surviving “Blue Dogs” promptly declared their vindication. For the Democrats’ right flank, Politico wrote, “Lamb’s successful center-left campaign is proof that the Democratic Party’s ‘big tent’ mentality is still a winning electoral strategy, despite an aggressive push from liberals for candidates that more closely adhere to the progressive purity made popular by the likes of Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).”

This analysis is at once banally true and insidiously misleading. There is no question that the Democratic Party would be unwise to trumpet the exact same message in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, as it does in Berkeley, California. And during his successful campaign in the former, Conor Lamb did hit culturally conservative notes on gun control and Nancy Pelosi, while saying as few words as he could get away with about immigration and Donald Trump. And yet, the suggestion that Lamb’s win exposed the folly of “progressive purity”-- as preached by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren-- is an odd one.

After all, those senators aren’t known as “purists” for their hard-line positions on gun control, or effusive support for the House Minority Leader. In fact, Sanders’s record on firearms and immigration includes stances about as conservative as those that Lamb just championed in southwest Pennsylvania. The reason why Sanders can nonetheless serve as a synonym for left-wing purity is precisely because the most salient divides in today’s Democratic Party do not lie on “culture war” issues, but rather, on economic ones-- which is to say, on those issues where Conor Lamb stayed least from progressive orthodoxy.

There is a lot at stake in these distinctions. The Democratic Party’s corporate wing has a vested interest in the idea that moderation on issues of regulation and redistribution is an electoral necessity in pro-Trump regions. Just last week, business-friendly Democrats helped Mitch McConnell make it easier for banks to discriminate against black people and evade regulatory scrutiny-- and justified their complicity (in anonymous quotes to the press) on grounds of political expediency: To get reelected in red and purple areas, Democrats needed to prove their “bipartisan” bona fides.

But there is little evidence that Democrats have any political incentive to broadcast their sympathy for Wall Street, or to demonstrate their sensitivity to corporate interests. In fact, there isn’t even much basis for believing that running competitive campaigns in pro-Trump districts and championing far-left economic policies are incompatible objectives. On the contrary, there’s actually some reason to think that Democratic candidates would have an easier time making inroads in Red America, if they ran on the right kind of radical fiscal policy-- like, for example, a federal jobs guarantee.

The idea that the federal government should serve as an employer of last resort-- by guaranteeing a public job to any American unable to find work in the private sector-- has a long history on the Democratic left. In the 1930s, the populist demagogue Huey Long popularized the concept as part of his Share Our Wealth plan-- a far-left alternative to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Three decades later, Martin Luther King Jr. called on the government to provide either guaranteed jobs-- or a guaranteed basic income-- to all unemployed Americans. And in the late 1970s, as U.S. workers suffered from the unholy combination of high unemployment and runaway inflation, the idea nearly made its way into law. But the proposal proved to be too left-wing for the Carter administration, and the Reagan Revolution banished it from the realm of “reasonable” debate-- until New York senator (and presumptive 2020 presidential candidate) Kirsten Gillibrand announced her support for the policy this week.

It isn’t hard to see why the federal jobs guarantee has spent so many decades in the wilderness: It is a genuinely radical proposal. In setting a minimum standard for wages, benefits, and hours-- and giving every private sector worker the option to walk off the job without suffering unemployment-- it’s a policy with the potential to drastically shift the balance of power between capital and labor. And given the scale of government intervention in the economy that it implies, it’s at least as “left-wing” as anything in Bernie Sanders’s 2016 platform; in fact, a jobs guarantee was ostensibly too radical of an idea for America’s favorite democratic socialist two years ago.

Thus, if American politics works as Blue Dog Democrats often suggest-- if swing voters have coherent ideological views, and move back and forth between the two major parties because their policy preferences (on economic and “identity” issues) lie near the center of a left-right axis-- then support for a federal jobs guarantee should be minuscule at the national level, and virtually nonexistent in Red America.

But new survey data from the progressive think tank Data for Progress (DFP) demonstrates the very opposite. Now, when an ideologically motivated think tank puts out a poll showing that the public supports a policy it endorses, one should generally take its findings with a bucket of salt; in most cases, you’ll find that the survey was strategically worded to yield the desired result. But as DFP co-founder Sean McElwee explains in The Nation, the think tank took pains to preempt that criticism:

To explore the possibility of Democrats’ running on a guaranteed-job plan, we asked the respected data analytics firm Civis Analytics to not only poll guaranteed jobs, but poll it in the way that would be most likely to gain opposition from voters. They asked respondents:

“Democrats in Congress are proposing a bill which would guarantee a job to every American adult, with the government providing jobs for people who can’t find employment in the private sector. This would be paid for by a 5 percent income tax increase on those making over $200,000 per year. Would you be for or against this policy?”

… The results of the Civis polling were nothing short of stunning, showing large net support for a job guarantee: 52 percent in support, 29 percent opposed, and the rest don’t know. “Even with explicit partisan framing and the inclusion of revenue in the wording, this is one of the most popular issues we’ve ever polled,” said David Shor, a senior data scientist at Civis Analytics.

These results are broadly consistent with previous polling on a jobs guarantee (in 2014, YouGov found a plurality of Americans backing the idea of “a law guaranteeing a job to every American adult, with the government providing jobs for people who can’t find employment in the private sector”). What makes DFP’s research revelatory is that it includes an estimate of the policy’s viability on a state-by-state basis. Using demographic data from a separate jobs-guarantee poll conducted by the Center for American Progress, the think tank modeled state-level support for the concept-- and found that “guaranteed jobs” is one of the least regionally divisive ideas in American politics.

“The urban-rural divide in support for the job guarantee is practically nonexistent,” Colin McAuliffe, a co-founder of Data for Progress, told New York, in an email. “We estimate 69% support in urban zip codes vs 67% in rural ones. On the other hand, for $15 minimum wage we estimate 69% support in urban zip codes and 49% support in rural zip codes.”

Now, these findings come with a small caveat: The CAP poll from which they derive did not include any mention of “Democrats” or tax increases. But it did describe a massive expansion of “big government,” asking voters if they agreed that “for anyone who is unemployed or underemployed, the government should guarantee them a job with a decent wage doing work that local communities need, such as rebuilding roads, bridges, and schools or working as teachers, home health-care aides, or child-care providers”-- and roughly two-thirds of rural America said yes.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Decades of political research has established that most voters view politics through the lens of identity, not ideology. Ordinary voters do not cast their ballots for whichever party or candidate most faithfully represents their abstract political philosophy, but rather, whichever one appears to best represent their people-- a group they may define with reference to class, region, religion, gender, race, or partisanship itself.

Thus, when the typical “conservative” working-class voter hears a description of the federal jobs guarantee, she does not plot the proposal’s ideological valence on the left-right spatial model she keeps in her head (or ask herself what Friedrich Hayek would think); she merely hears a common-sense idea for giving work to the idle, and providing employment security to working-class people like herself.

And this is part of what makes the idea that Democrats must campaign as economic moderates in working class, pro-Trump districts so misguided. Reachable voters in such areas are almost invariably cross-pressured: Their racial or cultural identities pull them toward the GOP, while their class consciousness (however dim) makes them more sympathetic to “liberal” economic ideas. Such culturally conservative, fiscally progressive voters constitute a hefty chunk of the American electorate: A recent study of voter opinion by the political scientist Larry Bartels found that about one-fourth of Hillary Clinton’s supporters espoused downright Trumpian views on “cultural” issues, while still endorsing (and, ostensibly, prioritizing) conventionally liberal convictions about the role of government in the economy. Meanwhile, Bartels found that a majority of Republican voters approved of “government efforts to regulate pollution, provide a decent standard of living for people unable to work, and ensure access to good health care, while substantial minorities favor reducing income differences and helping families pay for child care and college.”

This study, along with multiple others, testifies to a basic truth about American politics, circa 2018: If Democrats could only get voters to cast their ballots on the basis of their views on economic policy, they would dominate all levels of government.

But the party will make little progress toward that objective so long as it instructs its candidates in blue-collar, rural districts to disavow any policies that draw too sharp a contrast with Paul Ryan’s agenda. In reality, there’s reason to suspect that bold, easy-to-understand progressive policies like a jobs guarantee might actually make Democrats more competitive in such places, by increasing the electoral salience of class identity. In the Data for Progress poll, Republicans who earned less than $25,000 a year were more supportive of a jobs guarantee than Democrats who made over $150,000.

None of this is to suggest that every progressive economic policy is a political winner in every district in the United States. Conor Lamb’s reluctance to endorse a $15 minimum wage in rural Pennsylvania was not wholly irrational; given the median income in that part of the country, it’s likely that the $15 figure strikes some of his constituents as too high (although Lamb could have explained that the new wage floor would be phased in gradually). The point is simply that, contrary to conventional wisdom, there is no ironclad relationship between how politically pragmatic a given policy idea is, and how far “left” it would fall on an ideological scale.

A jobs guarantee is radical in theoretical terms, but has a strong claim to common sense in political ones: The idea that the government has a responsibility to provide opportunities for gainful employment to all its constituents is thoroughly bipartisan. Any speech about economic policy-- from any candidate from either party-- affirms this premise. There’s no (official) disagreement about the goal of maximizing employment in American politics; only about the means through which to do so. Republicans insist that reducing taxes on the wealthy and regulations on corporations is the silver bullet; Democrats have generally told a more complicated story involving education, innovation, diversity, and redistribution.

A federal jobs guarantee offers Team Blue a prescription for how the government can increase employment opportunities that’s just as simple as the GOP’s, but far more intuitive-- namely, “directly hire all of the unemployed people.” And once one stipulates that American voters do not actually have any implacable hostility to “big government,” it becomes obvious that this pitch should be an easier sell than the GOP’s “give yet another tax break to the rich.”

For this reason, it’s heartening that top Democratic think tanks are hashing out detailed versions of the policy, and that top Democratic presidential hopefuls like Kirsten Gillibrand are embracing it.

Pragmatic, moderate Democrats-- who wish to expand the borders of “Blue America” this fall-- would do well to follow her lead.

If you missed this video on Wednesday morning about Job Guarantee, it's worth watching now. It's a Sanders Institute clip of Jane Sanders speaking with Bernie's top economic advisor, Stephanie Kelton, about how Job Guarantee would work.