Article from Reason by Scott Shackford.

Hey, there, displaced factory worker! Looking for work? Bernie Sanders has a job for you. How would you like to make $15 an hour cleaning up park trails for your municipal government? What, you say that sounds like something an employee of the city’s parks department already does, or is supposed to do? What about repainting school playgrounds? Oh, the unionized school district employees gave you a stern look? Um. Hang on, he’ll get back to you.

Sanders has announced a new plan to make sure everybody who is unemployed gets a job. His plan is just to invent a bunch of new government jobs and pay $15 an hour with benefits! Ta-Da! Problem solved.

No, really. That’s kind of the plan. According to The Washington Post, which reported the proposal yesterday, Sanders’ office doesn’t have a cost estimate or any idea how it will be funded yet. Post policy writer Jeff Stein turned to a study by a pack of “left-leaning economists” for the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, who seem to think only good thingswill happen with the creation of millions of government-funded jobs, and hardly any bad things. Klein notes:

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.

Read the entire article at Reason.

Image Credit: By AFGE (AFGE Participates in #StopFastTrack Rallies) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons