One of the first things I learned as a registered Washington lobbyist, (yes, I admit it, I was a lobbyist in the 1990s), is “you can’t beat something with nothing.”
That’s a Washington insider’s way of saying that if you don’t like an opponent’s policies, it’s not enough to moan and complain about them and throw insults. You have to come up with a policy of your own that appeals to voters and can be offered to the public as an alternative.
This has been a problem for Democrats lately.
They can’t stand Donald Trump and insult him all day long, but they won’t prevail in major elections scheduled in 2018 and 2020 unless they offer the voters something other than constant ridicule of Trump.
A few smart Democrats, including Bernie Sanders and Cory Booker, have figured this out. Their alternative to Trump’s policies is a government guaranteed job for every American who wants one. The jobs will be low or negative productivity government jobs requiring few or no skills and offering no advancement.
This proposal may sound odd coming at a time when the official unemployment rate is 3.9%, the lowest in almost twenty years. Unemployment is 3.7% for adult white men and 3.5% for adult white women, while African-American unemployment is approaching historic lows.
Why roll out a jobs program now?
The answer is that the official unemployment statistics are highly misleading. They do not count approximately 10 million able-bodied working age adults who have simply given up on work.
Adjusted for those “missing workers,” the real unemployment rate is about 10%, a depression level figure.
Interest in the guaranteed jobs program is high. Critics say the program will destroy incentives and undermine the traditional work ethic. Supporters say it will help to raise wages because private employees will have to match the wages being offered by the program itself in order to compete with the government jobs.
In that sense, this is really a backdoor way to raise the Federal minimum wage and increase benefits. Whichever side you’re on, get used to hearing about this debate in the years ahead.
Who knows, maybe Trump will end up supporting it. Trump is not a traditional conservative, but he is a shrewd politician who may just steal his opponent’s best idea. You can’t beat something with nothing.
There is also a parallel idea beginning to gain traction in important circles…
I’ve been writing lately about something called “GBI,” which stands for guaranteed basic income. GBI is the new buzz phrase that’s the talk of academia, Silicon Valley and the elites on both coasts.
GBI goes by other names including universal basic income, UBI, or just basic income, but the policy is the same regardless of the name. The idea is that governments will guarantee every citizen a certain basic income as a matter of right. Everyone making below a certain amount of money gets a check.
It’s really just welfare by another name, but it would apply to a much broader group than just the poor and you would not have to pass any income tests or work requirements to qualify.
There is no means testing and no work requirement. The government just hands every man and woman a check every month whether rich or poor, young or old, employed or unemployed.
The idea behind GBI is that technology is making many jobs obsolete and those jobs are not coming back. Some Americans can compete in the new high-tech high-reward world, but most cannot.
If people cannot get jobs and incomes stagnate, then there will be no consumption and no one to buy the gadgets that the tech companies are making. Instead, everyone will get a check so they can spend freely.
My reason for highlighting GBI is that you’re going to be hearing a lot more about it in the next two years. Instead of a guaranteed job, leading Democratic Party politicians in the U.S. support GBI as part of their platform...
- Source, The Daily Reckoning
