In macroeconomic terms, taxes make everyone unemployed until they can earn enough of the state’s currency to satisfy their tax obligation. Since the government imposes the tax to draw resources and labor into the economy and allow it to provision itself via spending its currency it can be posited that it has an obligation to assure everyone the opportunity to be gainfully employed.
This would be a complex and cumbersome undertaking at the federal level, rivaled only by the military. However, the government doesn’t have to micro-manage all employees, only provide funding for them. This is quite simple from the perspective of the government being the monopoly issuer of the currency without restraint from revenue, which it has been ever since we left the gold standard in ’71.
A federal job guarantee for anyone who shows up willing and able to perform tasks designated by local community leaders could be the ultimate answer to many problems in our economy and society. We simply have to get over the mistake of equating the federal government's budgeting process with our own and assuming it has to “get” money before spending money as we do. The red ink of the currency issuing government is the only net source of black ink the economy has. Money created by bank lending can never be net saved or net retire the debt that created it in aggregate.
We can then use the budget to control the economy instead of using the economy as a control of the balance sheet of the government, which is mostly irrelevant. A balanced budget, by any logical definition, is a 100% tax rate that allows no store of value in exchange for resources traded for currency by the private sector but has been the political holy grail since ’80. The major problem with democracy is that none of us is as dumb as all of us.
One doesn’t have to go far to see many obvious jobs that aren’t being done in our cities and communities for lack of any path toward profit potential or public funding. A great percentage of those would likely be in communities where the predominant demographic is also first fired and last hired in our free market employment environment. This would mean that the workers would likely be improving their own neighborhoods and towns. This offers a much better sense of job satisfaction and purpose than any amount of welfare could.
Once the jobs are freed from the requirement to provide profit, beyond community and quality of life improvement, their definition can be widely expanded to include talents and passions of the workers. As long as sufficient goods and services are being produced to absorb the additional demand/currency there is little inflationary pressure.
Such a job guarantee program would set the floor for wages and benefits offered by private sector employment and would offer an automatic countercyclical safety net to preserve supply chains during business downturns. It would also offer employers a stable of workers to draw from with all of their social and work skills intact, which would likely eliminate the stigma attached to long term unemployment. Those employers would only have to overbid the wage/benefit from the job program to gain workers. This would have the added benefit of making lousy employers/jobs pay more to maintain a workforce.
