There are big deployment problems involved with a job guarantee, not the least of which is the misconception surrounding our federal finance system and taxation as “revenue”. The average American voter is barely able to balance their own checkbook, much less be knowledgeable of macro-economics at the level of money creation. This has presented the right with an enormous advantage in curtailing the dispensation of any economic justice, as the victims can easily be recruited into supporting, even cheering for, their own economic demise.
As long as federal taxation is viewed as “revenue” necessary to fund spending, and not just inflation control, the Constitutionally implied relationship between labor, government, and money cannot be achieved. Even many of the top economists can’t make the jump from money to resources necessary to properly administer the macro level of our economy, so to expect politicians to buck the prevailing winds of erroneous thought prevalent among voters is futile, and those that try will not be politicians for long.
Without the great depression, FDR would never have been able to push his New Deal through a reluctant Congress and gain the popularity he achieved. America has forgotten all of that and is back on the same track, willingly, that preceded that depression. A full half of America now sees the New Deal as “socialism”, even with no understanding of the word, and FDR as a socialist enemy of free-market capitalism when saving capitalism from itself was his primary motivation.
The one thing a UBI will do that can be guaranteed is to magnify the errors made in government spending and bring about the depression sooner with no structural means to mitigate the first stage of recession/stagnation that inevitably precedes such an event. With a government that is willing to eradicate entire nations and their populations to preserve an illusion that has become the status quo and a complicit corporate media, the next depression harbors the seeds of fascism, as history tells us before we even get into the discussion of the threat of climate change.
The Achille’s heel of democracy is, and always has been, democracy. This time it may be fatal to mankind.
