Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has a plan to “guarantee every American a job.” At least, that’s what the news headlines claimed Monday. The senator hasn’t actually rolled out the plan because his staff isn’t finished drafting it. They don’t even know yet how much it is going to cost or how it’ll be funded.
But, hey! Great headlines in the meantime!
The overall goal of Sanders’ plan is to “guarantee a job paying $15 an hour and health-care benefits to every American worker ‘who wants or needs one,'” the Washington Post reported. “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.”
The senator’s proposal calls for the creation of 12 “regional offices,” or districts (Hunger Games reference?), whose job it will be to receive “proposals for public works” from “local, state and American Indian tribe governments in every section of the country.”
The aforementioned 12 regional offices would act as a “clearinghouse for [public works] projects, tasked with sending recommended projects to a new national office within the Labor Department office for final approval,” the report notes.
The “hundreds” of projects that will receive funding will be mostly in the areas of “infrastructure, care giving, the environment, education,” and “other goals.”
This is good and all, but how much is this going to cost? No one can say.
“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,” the Post reported. Yet here we are, talking about the proposal like it’s a real thing and not just a concept being hashed out by a senator’s staffers.
Speaking of Sanders’ staffers, the parts of the plan they have hashed out include that the projects proposed to the 12 districts “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 Post report adds.
This is all rather interesting, but if it could work, why hasn’t it already been done? There’s probably a good answer to that. It feels like there’s not much point to this discussion without the senator’s office also offering the dreaded cost estimates. Is this actually feasible or is it just a pipe dream? Without being given the most important data (i.e. can we even afford this?), it’s difficult to think of this as anything but a fantasy.
(h/t Andrew Kugle.)
