Thread by @doctorow

One of #ModernMonetaryTheory's titans is @ptcherneva, a leading proponent of a federal jobs guarantee. In this long interview with @drvox, Tcherneva explains how a jobs guarantee would rescue us from the tragic chaos of mass unemployment.

vox.com/science-and-he…

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In one sentence: "A job guarantee is the idea that people who want decent work should be guaranteed that opportunity. It is a public option for a basic, decent job with basic living wages and basic benefits."

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Tcherneva wants "a program that solicits proposals from the community — from municipalities but also nonprofits. They come with projects and say, 'look, we’re doing this important work, but we’re understaffed and underfunded. We would like to staff these projects.'"

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It's a repudiation of the idea of the "natural rate of unemployment" ("Nobody says there’s a natural rate of homelessness or a natural rate of poverty. We don’t say 5 percent of children should not have access to public education.")

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But preserving a "natural rate of unemployment" shifts powers from workers to bosses, who get to lean on the fear of breadlines to win wage and working condition concessions from labor.

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It's a "counter-cyclical policy": when the private sector won't procure our labor, the state picks it up and uses it for important work that expands and contracts according to the labor pool - preventative infrastructure maintenance, improvement to public institutions, etc.

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Contrast this with #UBI, which Tcherneva calls "magical thinking": "if you get income, the market will provide what you need. We know the market doesn’t provide, even for people with income! You can still have a middle-class job and not be able to find affordable child care."

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UBI could be a stalking horse to replace benefits; and in the same way, a bad jobs guarantee could become workfare. Tcherneva is alive to this danger.

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"Workfare is predicated on punishment. People have to demonstrate they are deserving of whatever pittance the government is giving them. The job guarantee says the opposite: If you wish to work, it is the government’s responsibility to guarantee a dignified minimum option."

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Tcherneva cautions us against a "How would you do it" litmus test: "We don’t have the same test for other programs. Public education is a basic right. Does it work well everywhere? No, of course there are poorly run schools. Do scrap them? We don’t."

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And as to how we pay for it, the answer is #MMT, the idea that the factor that limits sovereign currency issuers whose debt is denominated in the currency they issue (like the USA) isn't money (since they can make as much money as they want) but resources.

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The US government can spend as much money into existence as it needs to procure anything for sale in US dollars. It's only when it bids against the private sector that such spending is inflationary, and the private sector does not want the labor of 25-35% of US workers.

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She's got a book about this coming on July 7, The Case for a Job Guarantee.

indiebound.org/book/978150954…

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(Coincidentally, that's also the day my next book comes out, an omnibus edition of Little Brother and Homeland with a new introduction by @snowden and a new cover by @unusualcorp).

us.macmillan.com/books/97812507…

eof/