Bernie Sanders: Economic Bill of Rights

[Jolly_Penguin]

I'm on board with all of those except for the first... a right to a decent job? How do they make that happen? Are we talking giant government work programs that don't actually do much of anything like Russia had?

If not, then how do you guarantee everyone a job, much less a decent job?

Yeah, should be decent living even for unemployed, in other words meaningful universal basic income for everyone.

Yes. Enter Yang.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

UBI is at least something concrete. The vague promises that "everyone will have a decent job" is empty and vague.

Does he mean millions of public jobs or does he mean new regulations on employers? Is the burden going to be on all tax payers, on employers, or all prosperous business (that maybe not have many if any employees)?

 

[Horatio Parker]

No. Again, every Democrat has promised to put anyone who is "able and willing" into a job.

Baloney

Where is the deception?

In making it seem as if that can be made into a Constitutional right? Have you not been paying attention?

No one has said "constitutional right" except you. Granted, the use of "right" is rhetorical but is nevertheless stronger rhetoric than previously. Because this is a radical policy.

Apparently neither do you, because you are the one who said the difference was that he was arguing to make it a right.

He's arguing to make a job available to everyone willing and able to work. Call it a right, a privilege or an ice cream cone, it's beyond anything offered by a major candidate before.

So, which is it? He's promising that if elected he'll do all that he can to create more jobs (i.e., ethe exact same thing that every single Democrat in the last fifty years at least has promised, as well as many Republicans for that matter), or that he is promising to make it a constitutional right to be employed?

Neither. A job would be available to anyone willing and able.

According to the OP, here's what he allegedly is shucking:

The right to a decent job that pays a living wage

Does he have some other definition of "right" that you know of and wasn't that nonsense what lead us down this path to begin with? If that's NOT merely rhetorical, then, again, it's just the same thing as every DNC platform from the past half century.

I don't know or care how precisely the word "right" would be defined in this context. I've explained the basic concept several times, which should be sufficient even to those with myopia.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

1776 - Lib Creation of Constitution - 1788 - Con Hamilton Era - 1800 Lib Jefferson Era - 1812 - Con Retreat after 1812 War - 1829 - Lib Jacksonian Democracy - 1841 - Con Domination by Slaveowners - 1861 - Lib Abolition of Slavery, Reconstruction - 1869 - Con The Gilded Age - 1901 - Lib Progressive Era - 1919 - Con Republican Restoration - 1931 - Lib The New Deal - 1947 - Con Eisenhower Era - 1962 - Lib Sixties Era - 1978 - Gilded Age II

Conservative eras accumulate problems that society's elites are reluctant to do much to solve -- if they consider them problems. This provokes a big effort to solve them, giving a liberal era. Liberal eras end from activism burnout, because it takes a lot of effort to do major reforms. Such eras also end from seeming to succeed and seeming to have gone too far. Thus setting the stage for another conservative era.

Ends of liberal eras can leave lots of unfinished business. The end of the Sixties Era left the US with the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment and the culture war over abortion. The Progressive Era ended with women getting the vote but with most of the feminist project being left undone. In fact, feminism only revived in the Sixties Era, with feminists then having to research their foremothers of half a century ago.

You've posted this same "era" stuff before. I responded to it Here I've been waiting for your response to my critique.

 

[Horatio Parker]

Robert Reich explains....

 

[lpetrich]

You've posted this same "era" stuff before. I responded to it Here I've been waiting for your response to my critique.

#10 "The 1980s were a chance to recoup and recover from the 1970s." -- a lot of stuff about the 1980's as the Good Old Days. The late 1980's had none of the slumps of the 1970's and early 1980's, I will concede. But the earning power of many Americans started to go downhill back then. So it was the beginning of Gilded Age II.

#22

I've seen people use that chart before. I have something to point out about it - there is no consistent definition of liberal across the ages spanned by the chart. It seems that the creator of the chart simply said "I like this era so I'll call it liberal" and "I don't like this era so I'll call it conservative". Do you honestly truly actually believe that the liberals of the "Liberal Movement to Create Constitution" have anything in common with the liberals of "Sixties Radicalism"?

I will concede that gentlemen in powdered wigs might not seem to have much in common with scruffy Sixties radicals.

But both periods were reform periods, even if the details of their reforms differed rather dramatically. The same is true of other reform periods -- there were lots of differences between them. For instance, the 1860's reform period had the Civil War, a bloody war that destroyed the plantation-slavery social order. No other reform period involved a similar big shooting war.

#31 - taking on "1776-1788 - Liberal Movement to Create Constitution"

It is true that their constitution was rather elitist, but in that regard, it was not much different from the Continental Congress. It was creating it that was important, creating a national government that could unite the rebellious North American colonies. But after it was created, many Americans wanted to rest and have more normal lives for a while. Thus, the first conservative period. It was thus much like the Eisenhower Era, what followed the New Deal era. President George Washington himself was much like Dwight Eisenhower in some ways, a military commander and war hero who became president.

 

[barbos]

• The right to a decent job that pays a living wage
• The right to quality health care
• The right to a complete education
• The right to affordable housing
• The right to a clean environment
• The right to a secure retirement
• The right to affordable ink jet cartridges

I added one more right

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Baloney

Piercing counter argument, but nevertheless my point stands. Every single Democratic platform for the past fifty years at least has included the promise to put everyone who wants a job to work. It's pretty much tattooed on every Democrat at birth.

In making it seem as if that can be made into a Constitutional right? Have you not been paying attention?

No one has said "constitutional right" except you. Granted, the use of "right" is rhetorical but is nevertheless stronger rhetoric than previously. Because this is a radical policy.

What? It's either that he's advocating that it be an actual Constitutional right or he isn't. There is no third "right." So, which is it? He's just promising to put everyone to work like every Democrat has done before him, or he's seriously arguing to make it a Constitutional right and therefore a radical policy?

Are you thinking he's arguing to get God to declare it a natural right or something, because "rights" are only that which come from the Constitution. The Bill of Rights is part of the Constitution. You understand that right? That's what makes them actual rights[/i (i.e., legally established/federally actionable).

Promising jobs for everyone is by no means a "radical" policy. Promising to make it a Constitutional right is a radical (and impossible) policy.

Apparently neither do you, because you are the one who said the difference was that he was arguing to make it a right.

He's arguing to make a job available to everyone willing and able to work.

So, NOT a "right." Just, again, what every Democrat always promises.

it's beyond anything offered by a major candidate before.

Horseshit.

From Hillary Clinton's 2016 platform (emphasis mine):

Hillary will make it a central priority to make sure every American can find a good-paying job, with rising incomes across the board. In order to create jobs today and help businesses create them in the future, she’ll make the largest investment in good-paying jobs since World War II.
...
Commit to a full-employment, full-potential economy and break down barriers so that growth, jobs, and prosperity are shared in every community in America.

2008 DNC Platform:

We come together at a defining moment in the history of our nation – the nation that led the 20th Century, built a thriving middle class, defeated fascism and communism, and provided bountiful opportunity to many. We Democrats have a special commitment to this promise of America. We believe that every American, whatever their background or station in life, should have the chance to get a good education, to work at a good job with good wages, to raise and provide for a family, to live in safe surroundings, and to retire with dignity and security. We believe that quality and affordable health care is a basic right. We believe that each succeeding generation should have the opportunity, through hard work, service and sacrifice, to enjoy a brighter future than the last.
...
We will start by renewing the American Dream for a new era – with the same new hope and new ideas that propelled Franklin Delano Roosevelt towards the New Deal and John F. Kennedy to the New Frontier. We will provide immediate relief to working people who have lost their jobs, families who are in danger of losing their homes, and those who – no matter how hard they work – are seeing prices go up more than their income. We will invest in America again –in world-class public education, in our infrastructure, and in green technology –so that our economy can generate the good, high-paying jobs of the future. We will end the outrage of unaffordable, unavailable health care, protect Social Security, and help Americans save for retirement. And we will harness American ingenuity to free this nation from the tyranny of oil.
...
We need a government that stands up for the hopes, values, and interests of working people, and gives everyone willing to work hard the chance to make the most of their God-given potential.

God, even.

2004 DNC Platform:

Our great middle class is hard-pressed. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, and millions more are struggling under the mounting burden of life's everyday costs.
...
We have a plan to build a strong, growing economy: creating good jobs, rewarding hard work, and restoring fiscal discipline.
...
The great promise of America is simple: a better life for all who work for it. No matter who you are, where you come from, or what you believe, as an American, you live in a land that offers you all the possibilities your hard work and God-given talent can bring.

The opportunity to build a better future starts with a good job. It has always been that way. From the time when most people worked in the fields, through the Industrial Revolution and into the Information Age, the opportunity for work, the rewards from work, and the dignity of work have made Americans successful and America strong.
...
We offer America a new economic plan that will put jobs first. We will renew American competitiveness, make honest budget choices, and invest in our future.
...
We believe that a strong America begins at home, with good jobs that support families and an equal chance for all our people.

There's a shitload more that gets into specifics of exactly how Kerry and Edwards planned on creating those jobs sector by sector.

2000 DNC Platform:

Today, the success of these new ideas is clear. After a generation of stagnation for many and decline for some, real wages for all working families have started to rise again. America has the lowest unemployment and fastest economic growth in more than 30 years. The American people have created 22 million new jobs. We have the lowest inflation rate in decades. More Americans own their home than ever before. Looking back on 1992, this much is clear: Americans are better off than we were eight years ago.

But ours is a record to build on, not to rest on. That's because eight years later, we face a new challenge: how to keep prosperity alive - and how to deepen it - in a fast-moving, fast-changing economy. We can never take our economic prosperity for granted nor can we afford to go back to either tax-and-spend or cut-and-run - the failed policies of the past. It took innovative, new Democratic policies to create the environment where prosperity could bloom. It will take more such policies to allow prosperity to blossom - to forge a prosperity that does not leave anyone out and does not leave anyone behind.
...
Finally, we must reinforce the basic American bargain of requiring and rewarding hard work and we must provide Americans with the opportunity to participate in key decisions at work and in their communities.
...
Democrats believe in hard work and we believe that work must pay. It is what has made America great. There is a basic bargain at the heart of the American story - hard work should be both required and rewarded. Democrats also believe that those who do work hard should not be stuck in place - they should get ahead. And those who work hard should have a voice in their workplace.

1992 DNC Platform:

The Revolution of 1992 is about restoring America's economic greatness. We need to rebuild America by abandoning the something-for-nothing ethic of the last decade and putting people first for a change. Only a thriving economy, a strong manufacturing base, and growth in creative new enterprise can generate the resources to meet the nation's pressing human and social needs. An expanding, entrepreneurial economy of high-skill, high-wage jobs is the most important family policy, urban policy, labor policy, minority policy and foreign policy America can have.

The Revolution of 1992 is about putting government back on the side of working men and women—to help those who work hard, pay their bills, play by the rules, don't lobby for tax breaks, do their best to give their kids a good education and to keep them away from drugs, who want a safe neighborhood for their families, the security of decent, productive jobs for themselves, and a dignified life for their parents.
...
Above all the Revolution of 1992 is about restoring the basic American values that built this country and will always make it great: personal responsibility, individual liberty, tolerance, faith, family and hard work. We offer the American people not only new ideas, a new course, and a new President, but a return to the enduring principles that set our nation apart: the promise of opportunity, the strength of community, the dignity of work, and a decent life for senior citizens.
...
Our Party's first priority is opportunity—broad-based, non-inflationary economic growth and the opportunity that flows from it. Democrats in 1992 hold nothing more important for America than an economy that offers growth and jobs for all.

Jobs for all as the party's "first priority." Much, much more there as well.

Is the horse dead enough to bury yet? No?

1988 DNC Platform:

WE BELIEVE that all Americans have a fundamental right to economic justice in a stronger, surer national economy, an economy that must grow steadily without inflation, that can generate a rising standard of living for all and fulfill the desire of all to work in dignity up to their full potential in good health with good jobs at good wages, an economy that is prosperous in every region, from coast to coast, including our rural towns and our older industrial communities, our mining towns, our energy producing areas and the urban areas that have been neglected for the past seven years. We believe that, as a first-rate world power moving into the 21st century, we can have a first-rate full employment economy, with an indexed minimum wage that can help lift and keep families out of poverty, with training and employment programs—including child care and health care—that can help people move from welfare to work, with portable pensions and an adequate Social Security System, safeguarded against emasculation and privatization, that can help assure a comfortable and fulfilling old age, with opportunities for voluntary national public service, above and beyond current services, that can enrich our communities, and with all workers assured the protection of an effective law that guarantees their rights to organize, join the union of their choice, and bargain collectively with their employer, free from anti-union tactics.

Shall we skip a few more years? It's all in there in every single election, but for the sake of truly burying this horse, 1960 DNC Platform[/ur]:

Our economy must grow more swiftly in order to absorb two groups of workers: the much larger number of young people who will be reaching working age in the 1960s, and the workers displaced by the rapid pace of technological advances, including automation. Republican policies which have stifled growth could only mean increasingly severe unemployment, particularly of youth and older workers.
...
A new Democratic Administration will reject this philosophy of economic slowdown. We are committed to maximum employment, at decent wages and with fair profits, in a far more productive, expanding economy.
...
Full Employment

The Democratic Party reaffirms its support of full employment as a paramount objective of national policy.

For nearly 30 months the rate of unemployment has been between 5 and 7.5% of the labor force. A pool of three to four million citizens, able and willing to work but unable to find jobs, has been written off by the Republican Administration as a "normal" readjustment of the economic system.

Clear?

So, which is it? He's promising that if elected he'll do all that he can to create more jobs (i.e., ethe exact same thing that every single Democrat in the last fifty years at least has promised, as well as many Republicans for that matter), or that he is promising to make it a constitutional right to be employed?

Neither. A job would be available to anyone willing and able.

So, just like Kennedy's promise, which is just like every other DNC platform's promise?

According to the OP, here's what he allegedly is shucking:

The right to a decent job that pays a living wage

Does he have some other definition of "right" that you know of and wasn't that nonsense what lead us down this path to begin with? If that's NOT merely rhetorical, then, again, it's just the same thing as every DNC platform from the past half century.

I don't know or care how precisely the word "right" would be defined in this context. I've explained the basic concept several times, which should be sufficient even to those with myopia.

Speaking of myopia....

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Robert Reich explains....

So, once again, we are NOT talking about a "right" to work. What Reich is talking about is creating a federal program that would offer anyone who wants it a guaranteed federal job that pays a "living" wage, its primary formation (as noted in the OP), stemming from the New Deal.

There are, of course, many problems with this idea, setting aside the fact that Republicans would never vote for such a thing. Remember them?

Aside from the fact that these measures were necessary during recessions as a last resort/fall back--not a general, ongoing concern--here's a good opinion piece on it from someone who used to support it, but now raises important points:

The basic idea of having the federal government act as the country’s employer of last resort is a good one. Although the economy occasionally puts the entire labor force to work, regular recessions mean that there are usually lots of people who want to find jobs but can’t.
...
During the Great Depression, the New Deal had success with a raft of programs designed to give jobs to the unemployed -- the Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Public Works Administration. Furthermore, there’s a good chance that a job guarantee would provide people with more dignity than programs that just give people cash. As long as the jobs weren’t obviously pure make-work, they could allow people to feel more valuable to society.
...
But there’s a very good chance that the politics of the modern day would turn a job guarantee into something very different from the New Deal -- and make it much less beneficial for the economy.

First, there’s the question of whether people could be fired from the new program. It’s easy to imagine good reasons to fire someone from a government job -- starting fights, for example, engaging in criminal activities or simply refusing to work. Even if a job guarantee allowed workers to be fired for egregious offenses, there would doubtless be intense public scrutiny of firing decisions, especially on social media. That would put immense pressure on the administrators of the federal jobs program to avoid firing even those who deserved to be fired.

The likely results would be a drop in productivity as some people realized they didn’t have to work to collect paychecks, increased resentment among those who felt morally obligated to put in a hard day’s labor, and disruption of the workplace due to toleration of disruptive or criminal behavior that would never be permitted at private companies.

Even more troubling, there’s the possibility that the guaranteed federal jobs could cannibalize the private sector and make the economy less productive. The New Deal jobs programs were undertaken at a time when the economy had a huge amount of unemployment, and there was little chance that workers with private sector jobs would jump ship. But in the absence of very high unemployment like that of the Great Depression, a job guarantee will compete with private companies.

And the job guarantee would often win that competition. Modern proposals would require that the federally guaranteed jobs be good jobs, with good pay and benefits. For example, here is the relevant text from the Green New Deal resolution recently introduced by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States

This sounds better than many of today's low-wage jobs.

Competition from these government-sponsored jobs would have an initially healthy result. It would force private companies to raise wages and increase benefits in order to keep up with the government. But as private-sector jobs improved, activists’ notion of what constitutes a good job would increase, and they would call for steadily higher wages and benefits for government work. Eventually this would exceed private companies’ ability to pay, so the job guarantee would come to represent the benchmark in the labor market and make up an ever-larger slice of the economy.

This would reduce productivity, since government jobs would likely generate less real value than private-sector jobs. Economists have found evidence that the beneficiaries of short-term government jobs tend not to go on to find work in the private sector after the programs end, suggesting that guaranteed jobs would be low-productivity work. As activists forced government wages and benefits higher, the private sector would find itself deprived of cooks, janitors, housekeepers, cashiers and the other people who make a modern economy run.

What's the better alternative? Something I've been arguing for years:

So although a job guarantee could potentially be a good thing, politics seem likely to make it bad. A better idea is to use private-sector employment subsidies to encourage companies to hire more unemployed and underemployed workers -- an approach that the data suggests is much more effective in terms of building long-term worker skills. Additionally, a combination of wage subsidies, minimum wages and increased worker bargaining power could help private-sector workers capture a bigger share of the value they create.

Instead of replicating unnecessary DMVs all over America, use the same money to subsidize private sector special skills job training programs--or, better, imo, simply provide specific and targeted tax deduction incentives instead of just cutting tax rates for corporations--so that workers are actually given on the job (or in preparation to be on the job) skills training that can serve them the rest of their lives.

Think of all the coal miners that have no modern skill sets for any other job. They are all hard workers, willing and able to work, but because they have no other marketable skills, they're fucked. Instead of putting those people behind a desk stamping government forms all day long, encourage corporations through specific tax deductions/incentives to tap that hard work ethic in training/work placement programs that teaches them any number of new industry skills in green initiatives (solar industry/wind/natural gas/nuclear) etc. or in more labor-intensive jobs like construction (either in infrastructure, so, yes, government; or real estate, so private; it needn't be binary).

Here are snippets from an in-depth meta study conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research (initially published in 2015, so, you know, before the recent unpleasantness). First a look at the extent of the (meta)study:

As noted, we have a total of 857 different impact estimates for 526 different PPSs (program-type/participant subgroup combinations) extracted from 207 separate studies. To deal with potential correlations between the program estimates from a given study - -arising for example from idiosyncratic features of the evaluation methodology -- we calculate standard errors clustering by study.

Column 1 presents the characteristics of our overall sample, while columns 2-6 summarize the estimates from five country groups: the Germanic countries (Austria, Germany and Switzerland), which account for about one quarter of all studies; the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden), which account for another quarter of studies; the Anglo countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, U.K. and U.S.), which account for just over 10% of studies; and two non-mutually exclusive groups of lower/middle income countries -- "non-OECD" countries (10% of studies), and Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries (10% of studies). Appendix Figure 1 shows the numbers of estimates by country. The largest source countries are Germany (253 estimates), Denmark (115 estimates), Sweden (66 estimates), the U.S. (57 estimates) and France (42 estimates).

Analysis/Findings (emphasis mine):

In the long period of recovery after the Great Recession there is renewed interest in the potential use of active labor market policies (ALMPs) to help ease a wide range of labor market problems, including youth unemployment and persistent joblessness among displaced adults (e.g., Martin, 2014). Although training programs, employment subsidies, and similar policies have been in use for well over 50 years, credible evidence on their causal impacts has only become available in recent decades (see Lalonde 2003 for a brief history). Within a relatively short period of time the number of scientific evaluations has exploded, offering the potential to learn what types of programs work best, in what circumstances, and for whom.

In this paper we synthesize the recent ALMP evaluation literature, looking for systematic evidence on these issues. 1 We extend the sample used in our earlier analysis (Card, Kluve, Weber, 2010; hereafter CKW), doubling the number of studies (from 97 to 207) and increasing the number of separate program estimates from 343 to 857. Many of the latest ALMP studies measure impacts on the employment rate of participants, yielding over 350 estimates for this outcome that can be readily compared across studies.
…
[T]he time profile of average impacts in the post-program period varies with the type of ALMP. Job search assistance programs that emphasize "work first" tend to have similar impacts in the short and long run, whereas training and private sector employment programs have larger average effects in the medium and longer runs. Public sector employment subsidies tend to have small or even negative average impacts at all horizons.
…
Job search assistance programs appear to be relatively more successful for disadvantaged participants, whereas training and private sector employment subsidies tend to have larger average effects for the long term unemployed.
…
A third conclusion is that public sector employment programs appear to be relatively ineffective at all time horizons.

Their conclusion:

With regard to the impacts of different types of ALMPs, we find that the time profiles of "work first" style programs that offer job search assistance or incentives to enter work quickly differ from the profiles of "human capital" style training programs and public sector employment programs. Human capital programs have small (or in some cases even negative) short term impacts, coupled with larger impacts in the medium or longer run (2-3 years after completion of the program), whereas the impacts from work first programs are more stable. We also confirm that public sector employment programs have negligible, or even negative program impacts at all time horizons.

Iow, a combination of job search assistance programs and private sector training programs/incentives are evidently the best way to go about getting people "willing and able" into jobs/careers, whereas public sector employment like what Reich/AOC/Sanders are evidently advocating not so good (in fact, negative impacts "at all time horizons"; i.e., short term, mid-term, long term).

 

[Horatio Parker]

Talk about nothing changing: worker training(for jobs that aren't there) and (more) subsidies for business.

These are arguments for the status quo that's gotten us where we are today.

You won't solve an aggregate demand problem by priming the pump.

Granted, a jobs guarantee isn't a panacea and will come with its own set of problems, but at least it's something new.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

• The right to a decent job that pays a living wage
• The right to quality health care
• The right to a complete education
• The right to affordable housing
• The right to a clean environment
• The right to a secure retirement
• The right to affordable ink jet cartridges

I added one more right

Nah, that should be part of a far more general right: The right to use the supplies of your choice with a product without interference. Put your chips in to identify the cartridge, fine--your control program can display the manufacturer of the cartridge but it can't take any adverse action about that. I wouldn't even mind the control panel displaying specific issues with the brand you're using. "Brand <X> ink detected. Note that prints made with this ink fade on average 50% faster than prints made with authentic ink." Make them compete on quality rather than lock-in.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

You've posted this same "era" stuff before. I responded to it Here I've been waiting for your response to my critique.

#31 - taking on "1776-1788 - Liberal Movement to Create Constitution"

It is true that their constitution was rather elitist, but in that regard, it was not much different from the Continental Congress. It was creating it that was important, creating a national government that could unite the rebellious North American colonies. But after it was created, many Americans wanted to rest and have more normal lives for a while. Thus, the first conservative period. It was thus much like the Eisenhower Era, what followed the New Deal era. President George Washington himself was much like Dwight Eisenhower in some ways, a military commander and war hero who became president.

It was post 31 specifically I was referring to. I did speak about more than just the movement to create the constitution.

Basically the heirs of Hamilton were sometimes liberal and sometimes conservative, and the heirs of Jefferson were sometimes liberal and sometimes conservative. Some ideas became more conservative over time. Some ideas became more liberal over time. There is no consistency to the term "liberal" or "conservative", not even the consistency of "more power to the people."