
 
 Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will propose a jobs guarantee program for every American worker “who wants or needs one.” (Alex Wong/Getty Images) 
 
 Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will announce a plan for the federal government to guarantee a job paying $15 an hour and health-care benefits to every American worker “who wants or needs one,” embracing the kind of large-scale government works project that Democrats have shied away from in recent decades. 
 
 Sanders's jobs guarantee would fund hundreds of projects throughout the United States aimed at addressing priorities such as infrastructure, care giving, 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, according to an early draft of the proposal. 
 
 A representative from Sanders's office said they had not yet done a cost estimate for the plan or decided how it would be funded, saying they were still crafting the proposal. 
 
 Sanders joins two other rumored 2020 Democratic presidential contenders who have expressed support for the idea of a jobs guarantee. The push reflects a leftward move in the party's economic policy, away from President Barack Obama's use of public-private partnerships or government incentives to reshape private markets and toward an unambiguous embrace of direct government intervention. 
 
 Job guarantee advocates say their plan would drive up wages by significantly increasing competition for workers, ensuring that corporations have to offer more generous salaries and benefits if they want to keep their employees from working for the government. Supporters say it also would reduce racial inequality, because black workers face unemployment at about twice the rates of white workers, as well as gender inequality, because 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.” 
 
 Others, including some Democrats, are not convinced. The idea is also dead on arrival with Republicans in control of Congress, and conservatives have trashed the idea of a jobs guarantee as impractical, impossibly expensive and dangerous to the private sector. 
 
 “It completely undercuts a lot of industries and companies,” said Brian Riedl, of the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, a think tank. “There will be pressure to introduce a higher wage or certain benefits that the private sector doesn't offer.” 
 
 Ernie Tedeschi, an economist who served in Obama's Treasury Department, said there would be large logistical and practical challenges in ensuring millions of new federal jobs serve productive ends. 
 
 “It would be extremely expensive, and I wonder if this is the best, most targeted use of the amount of money it would cost,” he said. 
 
 Critics point to potential unintended consequences in the plan. Although it would probably boost wages for workers, those higher wages could bump up costs for private businesses, leading some to hire fewer workers or take other steps — such as reducing benefits or looking to replace workers with machines. 
 
 These effects would be more pronounced if the plan were to pull away workers who hold private-sector jobs, rather than pulling in workers without jobs who wanted them. The unemployment rate currently sits at 4.1 percent, a historically low figure. But that figure does not include people who've given up looking for work, and the labor force participation rate — a broader measure of those not working — suggests there may be people not counted among the unemployed who would join the labor force. 
 
 The new government spending could also lead to inflation, decreasing the real value of workers' wages. 
 
 Obama's economic initiatives, generally, focused on using the government to influence private markets and industries in pursuit of policy goals. His economic stimulus plan — in which he and Democrats tried to pull the United States out of a deep recession — channeled money through private enterprises to boost hiring and investment, and offered tax cuts and rebates in the hope of getting people to spend more. 
 
 But in a new political climate, ideas such as a jobs guarantee plan is gaining traction among prominent Democrats. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.) backed the idea on Twitter earlier this month. As first reported by Vox, Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.) last week also announced his intention to introduce a separate bill that would create a pilot program for a job guarantee in 15 rural and urban areas. 
 
 Under the early draft of Sanders's job guarantee, local, state and American Indian tribe governments in every section of the country would send proposals for public works projects for their areas to 12 regional offices that encompass the country. These 12 regional offices would act as a clearinghouse for these projects, tasked with sending recommended projects to a new national office within the Labor Department office for final approval. 
 
 Once approved, the projects would hire workers at a minimum salary of $15 an hour with paid family and medical leave, and offer the same retirement, health, and sick and annual leave benefits as other federal employees. 
 
 About 2,500 job training center and employment offices already exist around the country, and the plan imagines tasking them with connecting workers to these local projects. When the programs are up and running, anyone can wander into a job center and — at least, in theory — find either job training or a job on one of these projects. 
 
 The plan's authors envision millions of Americans being hired under the proposal, with the number going up during economic recessions in the private sector and down during economic booms. They also say it would significantly increase the government's involvement in the American economy to a level not seen since World War II, if ever in the country's history. 
 
 Beyond how to pay for the plan, many other aspects of the jobs guarantee have not been specified. 
 
 It's not clear 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 to the New Deal era, when President Franklin D. 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.” ||||| Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) has a big idea: give 15 local areas federal money so they can guarantee all their residents a job. 
 
 The Federal Jobs Guarantee Development Act, announced by Booker on Friday, would establish a three-year pilot program in which the Department of Labor would select up to 15 local areas (defined in the bill as any political subdivision of a state, like a city or a county, or a group of cities and counties) and offer that area funding so that every adult living there is guaranteed a job paying at least $15 an hour (or the prevailing wage for the job in question, whichever’s higher) and offering paid family/sick leave and health benefits. 
 
 The idea of a government job guarantee ensuring all adults who want employment get it has a long history in American politics, but it has gained popularity as the Democratic Party has sought to embrace bigger and more ambitious economic policies in the wake of the 2016 election. 
 
 Booker’s plan is essentially a pilot version of a proposal from Duke’s Mark Paul and William Darity, Jr. and the New School’s Darrick Hamilton, economists who have, together and individually, advocated a job guarantee for years, well before the current surge in enthusiasm. Most recently, Paul, Darity, and Hamilton wrote up their proposal for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a highly influential left-of-center think tank, in a clear sign the idea was gaining traction. Booker’s bill is an even bigger step forward. 
 
 “The federal jobs guarantee is an idea that demands to be taken seriously,” Booker said in a statement. “Creating an employment guarantee would give all Americans a shot at a day’s work and, by introducing competition into the labor market, raise wages and improve benefits for all workers.” 
 
 The policy case for a job guarantee 
 
 The idea of a job guarantee serves both a policy and a political purpose. 
 
 On the policy side, a job guarantee would, in theory, effectively end recessions in America. Right now, the US government’s strategy when the economy stops growing is to use a combination of monetary stimulus (in which the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates or buys up billions of dollars of long-term bonds) and fiscal stimulus (as in the 2009 stimulus package, which blended a boost in spending with temporary tax cuts). 
 
 For a variety of political and institutional factors, the Fed and Congress weren’t able to do enough in 2008 to 2010 to prevent unemployment from breaking 10 percent, and they certainly weren’t able to effect a full recovery within a couple years. Returning to normal unemployment rates took nearly a decade, resulting in years of human misery and lost wage gains that a healthier and faster recovery could’ve delivered. 
 
 Job guarantee advocates argue that their plan effectively creates a permanent form of fiscal stimulus that politicians wouldn’t need to scramble to pass whenever disaster hits. Instead, if the economy took a turn for the worse and companies started shedding jobs, the government would automatically soak up anyone who’s laid off and give them work. That, in turn, would put more money in consumers’ pockets, boosting demand and improving business’ prospects. Before you know it, the economy’s back to normal. 
 
 Advocates argue the policy could prove beneficial during economic booms as well. The fruits of economic recoveries and booms aren’t evenly shared, demographically. As of March 2018, 60.7 percent of white people in America were employed, but only 58.4 percent of black people were. 
 
 Once black men’s disproportionate representation in prisons and jails is accounted for, the gap grows still larger. In 2016, the most recent year for which we have data, a mere 27.7 percent of people with disabilities age 16 to 64 were employed, compared to 72.8 percent of nondisabled people. 
 
 Nor do booms affect all geographic areas equally. There are still 337 counties or county-equivalents with a combined labor force of over 6.7 million people that have unemployment rates of 7 percent or higher as of February 2018. Seventy-eight counties, like Yuma, Arizona, still have unemployment rates in excess of 10 percent. 
 
 A job guarantee would, in principle, lessen those inequalities. People in struggling regions would be guaranteed work without having to move. Black Americans and disabled Americans wouldn’t be expected to wait until employers have run out of white and nondisabled people to hire until they get their chance. 
 
 Finally, advocates argue that the policy would lead to an increase in wages for everyone. That’s a big benefit at a time when unemployment is low but wage growth is still sluggish. 
 
 Think of it this way: Walmart pays its employees a minimum of $10 per hour; part-time employees aren’t guaranteed benefits like health insurance or a 401(k) match. 
 
 If you’re a part-time employee at Walmart, and all of a sudden you can get $15 an hour, work full time, and earn full benefits by working for the federal government — wouldn’t you? And, knowing that, wouldn’t Walmart try to increase wages to keep you? 
 
 Advocates say Walmart would. And they have some empirical evidence on their side from India, where a type of job guarantee known as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme functions largely as an insurance system, offering a source of income for rural farmers during the dry season. 
 
 A group of economists — UC San Diego’s Karthik Muralidharan and Paul Niehaus and the University of Virginia’s Sandip Sukhtankar — found that the job guarantee, they estimate, increased earnings for low-income households by 13.3 percent. Ninety percent of that increase is due to higher wages and increased work in the private sector, not the job guarantee program itself. 
 
 Just as job guarantee advocates would predict, the program bid up wages everywhere. Perhaps the most surprising result was that the program not only increased wages, but increased employment in the private sector. 
 
 The political case for a job guarantee — and the challenges it faces 
 
 The fact that Cory Booker, a rising star in the Democratic Party and a likely 2020 contender who faces considerable skepticism from the left due to his stances on education and Wall Street, has endorsed experimenting with a job guarantee is a clear indication that some in the party think it could be a political winner as well as a policy advance. 
 
 In the wake of the 2016 election, liberal commentators have latched onto the job guarantee as a way to forge a cross-racial working-class coalition. They need a plan that appeals to both to the white Wisconsin and Michigan voters who switched from Obama to Trump and to black and Latino workers left behind by deindustrialization. The ideal plan would both improve conditions for lower-income Americans while supporting Americans’ strong intuition that people should work to earn their crust. 
 
 “A federal job guarantee is both universal—it benefits all Americans—and specifically ameliorative to entrenched racial inequality,” Slate’s Jamelle Bouie noted. 
 
 “The job guarantee asserts that, if individuals bear a moral duty to work, then society and employers bear a reciprocal moral duty to provide good, dignified work for all,” Jeff Spross added in the influential center-left journal Democracy. 
 
 “If Democrats want to win elections, they should imbue Trump’s empty rhetoric with a real promise: a good job for every American who wants one,” wrote Bryce Covert in the New Republic. “It’s time to make a federal jobs guarantee the central tenet of the party’s platform.” 
 
 As with any sufficiently big idea, however, a job guarantee comes with risks. It would be expensive, for one thing. Paul, Darity, and Hamilton’s plan, as outlined for the CBPP, would cost $543 billion per year, they estimate. For context, that rivals the size of Medicare, which will cost $707 billion this year, and the size of the defense budget, which totals $622 billion. The Center for American Progress has proposed a more modest $158 billion per year government jobs plan, but it wouldn’t actually guarantee a job to all who sought one, as Paul, Darity, and Hamilton have proposed. Booker’s bill doesn’t have an estimated cost yet. 
 
 Second, it’s not clear what exactly participants in a job guarantee scheme would do. Most proposals are somewhat vague on this point, mentioning everything from child care to infrastructure. The Booker bill leaves most of this up to localities to figure out. Cities, counties, and other areas would get a chance to apply for the program, and the Department of Labor would be required to pick a mix of urban and rural areas to try the idea out in. Once the program was up and running, the vast majority of jobs offered would be in the public sector, and participants who need more skills development would be offered up to eight weeks of training. 
 
 Positions meeting “a list of national job priorities … that shall include child care, care for seniors and individuals with disabilities, [and] infrastructure activities” would be encouraged, and private sector employers would benefit from the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, a benefit which currently gives employers a few thousand dollars toward wages when they hire veterans, welfare or food stamp recipients, ex-felons, and other people with barriers to employment. But beyond that, the bill doesn’t give many specifics. 
 
 A job guarantee would ideally provide for jobs that are nice to have but could be nixed when the economy improves and the program shrinks in size. Those are pretty hard to identify. If a job guarantee were enacted in a recession, and many of the enrollees became child care providers, what happens when the economy improves and workers find jobs in the private sector? It wouldn’t be tenable to eliminate a universal child care program because the economy improved. Nor, if the program employed bus drivers, would it make much sense to cut bus routes. 
 
 The Booker bill requires that the program be subject to an ongoing rigorous evaluation, which would help determine how well-equipped local governments are to make those kinds of distinctions. That would be a welcome addition to the research literature, as there’s some past evidence suggesting programs like this struggle to succeed. Berkeley economist David Card recently conducted a meta-analysis of more than 200 evaluations of programs meant to boost labor markets, along with fellow economists Jochen Kluve and Andrea Weber. While they found a variety of impacts of different programs, one constant was that public employment programs that simply hired people directly performed worst. 
 
 “Public sector employment subsidies tend to have negligible or even negative impacts at all horizons,” the study concludes. “This pattern suggests that private employers place little value on the experiences gained in a public sector program.” One reason, they suggested, was that the programs did nothing to help build skills that would make participants more employable. 
 
 A job guarantee, though, would be on an entirely different scale, and the Booker bill would enable an evaluation that could determine if its effects are more like the successful Indian program or the failed efforts that Card, Kluve, and Weber studied. 
 
 With Donald Trump in the White House and Republicans in charge of both houses of Congress, it’s doubtful Booker’s bill will become law anytime soon. But that’s not really the point. Until his proposal, the closest thing there was to a job guarantee bill in Congress was Rep. John Conyers’s (D-MI) Humphrey-Hawkins 21st Century Full Employment and Training Act, named after a largely failed 1970s bill pushed by civil rights activists and unions to enact a job guarantee. But the bill fell short of establishing a formal guarantee, and Conyers has since resigned from Congress in a sexual harassment scandal. 
 
 Booker has put the idea back on the Democratic agenda, and in a form that could be readily passed at relatively minimal cost (given the pilot program nature) when Democrats are next in power. That’s an important step, and one that significantly improves the odds that the idea will be part of the next Democratic president’s to-do list. ||||| WASHINGTON ― It might be the next big idea among liberal policy experts, but Senate Democratic leaders are not yet ready to embrace a government jobs guarantee. 
 
 Several members of the Senate Democratic caucus, including Cory Booker (N.J.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have endorsed the goal of eliminating unemployment and poverty through direct government hiring. 
 
 HuffPost asked Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) if he could support legislation Sanders is drafting that would guarantee a job paying at least $15 an hour to everyone in the United States who wants one. 
 
 “I’d like to look at his proposal,” Schumer said. “I think we should do everything we can to get people jobs and I’d look at his proposal. I haven’t studied it yet.” 
 
 Democratic Sens. Patty Murray (Wash.) and Dick Durbin (Ill.), who are members of Schumer’s leadership team, also said they hadn’t seen the legislation. 
 
 Sanders is looking forward “to starting a conversation with the American people” about the benefits of a jobs guarantee, spokesman Josh Miller-Lewis said in an email. 
 
 “A federal jobs guarantee is an already popular idea that has the potential to be the next transformative progressive policy,” he said. 
 
 Sanders’ proposal, which hasn’t been formally introduced yet, would likely involve substantial government spending and radically reshape the U.S. labor market. It’s the kind of idea Democrats might have scoffed at in the past; President Barack Obama, for instance, tended to agree with Republicans that it was important to reduce budget deficits. 
 
 “A federal jobs guarantee is an already popular idea that has the potential to be the next transformative progressive policy." Sen. Bernie Sanders spokesman Josh Miller-Lewis 
 
 But Republicans abandoned the pretense of fiscal responsibility when they passed a tax reform bill last year that will add more than $1 trillion to the national debt. 
 
 “If Republicans could give $1.5 trillion in tax cuts to corporations and the wealthiest among us,” Gillibrand said in a tweet earlier this month, “why can’t we invest a similar amount in a guaranteed jobs plan for regular Americans who are unemployed and willing to work to better their local community?” 
 
 Booker last week announced a separate proposal that would test the jobs guarantee idea in 15 local areas, saying the idea ought to be taken seriously. “Creating an employment guarantee would give all Americans a shot at a day’s work and, by introducing competition into the labor market, raise wages and improve benefits for all worker,” Booker said in a press release. 
 
 For years, Democrats in the House of Representatives, led by former Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), have introduced “full employment” bills that had similar policy goals, but with little hope of success and almost no news coverage. The Donald Trump era has seemingly created space for ideas that may have once seemed politically impossible. A Sanders proposal to give more Americans government health insurance, for instance, garnered far more support among Democratic senators than similar proposals have in previous years. 
 
 An effective full employment program would cost more than half a trillion dollars annually, making it almost as large as Medicaid, according to a lengthy paper published in March by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, an influential liberal think tank. (Theoretically, the cost of direct spending on jobs could be largely offset by reduced spending on Medicaid and other safety net programs, since people would have too much income to qualify). 
 
 The jobs guarantee proposals offers a stark contrast to Republican “workforce development” proposals, which are designed to make workers more willing to take low-paying jobs by reducing access to benefits such as food stamps. 
 
 Both the Democratic jobs guarantee and a Republican food stamps plan under consideration in the House would ramp up existing government workforce offices situated around the country. Democrats in the House have said the GOP plan to shift some food stamp spending from benefits to training programs would create too much of an administrative headache.
– Bernie Sanders is working on a plan that would allow the federal government to guarantee a $15-per-hour job, plus healthcare benefits, to every worker in the US "who wants or needs one," per an early draft of the proposal obtained by the Washington Post. The jobs guarantee would encompass projects involving infrastructure, education, the environment, and care giving. It's not clear when Sanders will formally present the plan; a representative says Sanders' office has not done a cost estimate for the plan or determined where its funding would come from. Sanders' announcement comes after two other Democrats, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Sen. Cory Booker, recently backed the idea of a jobs guarantee plan. Booker is aiming to create a three-year pilot program to test such a guarantee in 15 areas, Vox reports. Supporters of such a plan say it would increase competition for workers, thus forcing corporations to increase their wages and benefits in order to compete with government jobs. But Republicans, who currently control Congress, say the idea is impractical, and even some Democrats agree with that. "It would be extremely expensive, and I wonder if this is the best, most targeted use of the amount of money it would cost," says one economist who served in Obama's Treasury Department, noting that it would be tricky to make sure millions of new jobs—the authors of the Sanders plan do envision it would hire millions of Americans—are all actually productive. The Huffington Post spoke to Democratic Senate leaders and reports that they don't seem quite ready to "embrace" the idea; all Chuck Schumer would say is that he wants to look at Sanders' proposal.