A Full Employment Program Would Be Beneficial for the United States

First taking a look at the Con BOPs: 1) Pro has not put forth a weighing mechanism. He cites reduction of poverty, boost to the economy, etc as positive effects, while a higher income tax as a negative. So what's the net benefit? You can't add poverty+economy-taxes, because none of them are in the same units. He needs to present and defend a utility function. 2) See Con Arguments Section 3) Pro specifies the USFG as his agent of action. He doesn't explain why this is a good choice. The Con position is that the USFG would be unlikely to implement his policy faithfully because it is inconsistent with their interests. Pro is offering politicians an opportunity to help poor black people. AT&T is offering them $45,000,000 [1]. Depending on how heavily Pro contests this point, I can dig up more complete evidence showing the ulterior motives of the vast majority of politicians. Pro himself states that there is already a law for lowest unemployment, but that "this law is completely meaningless and is never enforced.". If another law to increase employment goes completely ignored, why would his be any different? Why do we need a new one? === Pro Arguments === 1) Reduction/Elimination of Poverty Pro thinks that if everyone can get paid at least the minimum wage, it will alleviate poverty. However, the minimum wage is only nominal, so even though he's putting more money in the hands of consumers, he's decreasing companies' net revenue. There's no way companies can expand production. Its like taking water out of the deep end of the pool and putting it into the shallow. Similarly, if you taxed poor people and gave it to the rich, nothing would change. Sure, the poor would have less money to buy stuff with, but the rich could lower their prices to achieve the same volume. Their profits would be the same because instead of getting money up front, they're just getting a portion of it automatically. This is why we see no coalition of rich dudes, but rather individual industries lobbying for individual benefits. The only redistributionist policies that can benefit their recipients are asymmetric. i.e. if the money went from all the poor to just a few of the rich. The few rich would also have to lower their prices, but they are getting a proportionately more cash from the redistribution. It is other rich people who would be hurt by this policy, because they must move to lower price levels without compensation. My point is that wealth redistribution is more complicated than moving around green bits of paper. You have to look at underlying production structures. At best, this achieves a more equal distribution of a fixed basket of goods among consumers. It is unclear if this equality of poverty is preferable to the status quo. 2) Boost to the Economy The increase in consumer spending is offset by the increase in taxes. So one would expect the net economic effect to be, at best, zero. 3) Creation of Competition and Employers for Workers Since the new government jobs already pay minimum wage, and there is an infinite supply of government jobs, all minimum wage jobs in the private sector would disappear overnight. The only people working in the private sector would be those who can earn higher than minimum wage. As a result, the private sector would become crippled, and its real productivity would fall. Even if it doesn't destroy all minimum wage private sector jobs, the artificial increase in working conditions would also raise production costs for employers, increasing the price of goods and services. Higher prices for food and clothing is bad for other poor people. There's no point in paying higher wages if you're just going to get proportionately higher prices. 4) Increase In Standard of Living If Pro is right about any of 1, 2, or 3, then yeah. But lets have a look at some numbers. 9% of the US workforce is unemployed [2] and there are 154.5 mn Americans in the workforce [3]. According to the BLS' retarded excel spreadsheets [4], you gotta be rockin' around $25k/yr to be above poverty as a 4 person household. .09*154.5e6*25e3= $350bn/year. Now Pro is trying to make his case on humanitarian grounds. According to the Red Cross, it cost less than $1 to save a life through vaccinations [5]. It is unlikely that this will scale, considering that there are not 350 billion people, but there are a myriad of deadly problems that would be very cheap to fix like Vitamin deficiency [6]. Considering that 25,000 people die every day from malnourishment [7], a full employment program for Americans [8] is not anywhere close to the most humanitarian use of money. 5) So what's the catch? Higher tackses on rich people mostly. If they don't break even on Pro's tax scheme, they will have less money with which to invest. But capital development is entirely dependent upon investment and benefits the whole country by producing greater quantity and quality of goods. For example, if Exxon has to pay more in taxes, it will have less money to produce oil. This will lower the supply of oil, and increase prices for everyone. Additionally, the higher tax rate reduces the incentive to invest and take risks at all because the payoffs are now lower. So there will be less capital development, like factories and machines. It may also encourage companies to move operations offshore, further harming the US economy. === Con Arguments === 1) Public sector jobs Are unspecified by Pro. What would people be doing? States cannot engage in economic calculation, because they do not have prices. Because they can never know what enterprises are profitable, they will fail to allocate resources as efficiently as the private sector. They are essentially blind. AFAICS, this will create a new class of state dependents, with no private experience, and therefore highly diminished marketability. It may even discourage the pursuit of higher education, unpayed internships or apprentice positions, because Pro is providing a permanent easy-mode for everyone. 2) Depending on how Pro answers above, maybe more. I also don't want to turn this into a character-constrained debate. So I'll end here! I don't doubt for a second that Pro isn't well meaning, but poverty is a complex issue. My opposition to his policy isn't out of some fetish for Kapitalists or Ayn Rand. I don't like feel-good politics, I like results. I'm not saying "screw poor people", I'm saying this won't work and we need to try something else. [1] http://www.opensecrets.org... [2] http://www.google.com... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org... [4] http://www.census.gov... [5] http://redcrosschat.org... [6] http://www.oohoi.com... [7] http://www.newsweek.com... [8] http://images2.memegenerator.net...