What Good is a Federal Job Guarantee: Another Basic Income Plug

What good is a Federal job guarantee, when states are putting their entire populations under quarantine?

This article has a dual purpose.  One purpose is to call on Bernie Sanders to drop his Federal Job Guarantee agenda, an ill advised program that can only ever delay but never solve the problem of declining numbers of jobs as more and more jobs are automated, in favor of a Universal Basic Income, which he once believed was a noble long term goal.  Of course, Sanders is never going to read this.  This blog does not have a very large number of followers, and last time I checked, it was not getting a whole lot of traffic.  The other purpose is to review the pros and cons of a basic income once again, with the addition of some things I have not discussed in the past, because no one was ready to listen.


What good is a Federal job guarantee, when states are putting their entire populations under quarantine?  U.S. culture has changed substantially just over the last few weeks as something that was unthinkable only a month ago has actually happened.  As such it is time to discuss Universal Basic Income in a context that people would have laughed at a month ago.  There are a lot of proven benefits a basic income can bring.  One of those is acting as a financial safety net for people who lose their jobs or are otherwise unable to work for more than a week or two.  Financial advisors recommend that people save around six months worth of wages, to cover unexpected situations of this nature, but few people do.  Most middle class and wealthy people, who are actually able to afford to do this, make poor financial decisions that make saving impossible.  Poor people do not get paid enough to afford to save, despite the fact that most of them are forced to make wiser financial decisions by high prices on housing and other things.  Further, how can anyone expect individuals to save significant amounts of money when economists are telling businesses and individuals to spend, spend, spend!  The fact is, the U.S. economy is built on a fundamental assumption that nothing bad can ever happen and the way things are now is how they are always going to be.  Business experts recommend businesses to take on all available debt that they can spend on things that will bring in more profits than the interest on the debt.  Individuals are recommended by financial advisors to go into debt on homes, so long as they can afford the mortgage payments.  Banks and real estate agents conspire to get home buyers to spend the maximum amount they can afford on a home.  The problem with all of this is that the recommendation to businesses is based on the assumption that the profits a business can make in the future will always be equal to or larger than the profits that business can make now.  What happens if profits drop below the cost of interest?  The recommendation to and pressure on individuals to buy homes that are barely within the limits of their budgets assumes that those individuals will continue to have the same or greater income until the debt is paid off.  Again, what happens if a job is lost or an injury makes an income earner unable to bring in wages for even a few months?  What happens if a global pandemic of a fairly mild diseases causes mass panic and most people are quarantined by government mandate, many unable to work, for a few weeks or even months?

Up to now, the impact of poor financial advice to businesses and individuals has been largely ignored, because it is easy to ignore when only a small percentage of the population is affected by these tragic events at a time.  We can deliberately ignore the injustice of people losing jobs when businesses fail due to following incredibly poor financial advice, because it is only a few businesses here and there, and society can pick up the slack.  We can ignore the incredible harm unexpected loss of income brings, because again, it only happens to a very small percentage of the population at a time.  This makes it easy for law makers to ignore the fact that programs like a Federal Job Guarantee cannot help people with major disabilities, people who are not suited to the kind of work the government is offering, and people who's time is more valuable to society as a whole doing domestic work like raising children and caring for old and disabled people.  It is also easy to ignore the fact that the government can never truly guarantee jobs.  Consider a Federal Job Guarantee program now.  Just last week, 3.3 million Americans (that's 10% of the population) filed for unemployment.  How fast could a well funded, very robust Federal Job Guarantee program find work for 3.3 million people?  It would probably take over a year to place everyone, and it would cost far more than the $2 trillion being spent on "economic stimulus" to create enough government projects to employ that many people.  That 3.3 million is just the tip of the iceberg.  In another recent article, the math demonstrates that a Federal Job Guarantee would already cost around $10 trillion, without this additional 3.3 million people.  Another 3.3 million workers would increase the cost by another $500 billion.  What else could we do with $10 trillion a year?  Oh right, give every single American man, woman, and child $30,303 a year, no strings attached!  The cost of a Federal Job Guarantee capable of providing all of the jobs we "need" could instead be used to fund a ludicrous Universal Basic Income, averaging $76,363 per U.S. household (2.52 people per U.S. household, on average).  On top of all of that, most of the government projects the Federal Job Guarantee would provide labor for would be closed down right now, due to stay-at-home orders and quarantines.  A Federal Job Guarantee cannot provide the kind of jobs people need, when they have to stay at home.

A basic income is not bound to people being able to leave their homes.  A simple basic income, providing an average of $2,500 per U.S. household per month ($30,000 per year) would only cost $3.8 trillion.  We can do better though.  A basic income of $1,000 per adult per month and $500 per child per month (the most recent version of Yang's Freedom Dividend plan) would only cost around $3.3 trillion a year.  Perhaps a future article will demonstrate how this can be reduced to less than $500 billion with a simple recovery tax that guarantees everyone gets to keep some of the basic income at the same time as recovering part of it from people who have enough other income that they do not need it.

Universal Basic Income has a lot of serious benefits.  Among them are significantly lower crimes rates, rearrangement of jobs that significantly increases economic productivity, the creation of many new businesses, the creation of new jobs, the potential to lower or eliminate minimum wage for a freer market without oppressively low wages, elimination of poverty, easier access to higher education, lower drug use, economic stimulus, greater economic freedom, and a financial safety net in hard times.  And now, we add to that, an extension of the financial safety net, a financial safety net even during broad reaching events that affect everyone.  A Federal Job Guarantee can provide some of these benefits for a portion of the population, most of the time, but the idea that it is even a guarantee is wrong.  A basic income can serve everyone all of the time.  A Federal Job Guarantee can easily be overwhelmed by a fairly mild but highly contagious disease in less than a week.

What about the cons?  If the government gives people free money, they will just quit working, won't they?  Nope.  Many will quit their current jobs and get new ones.  This will be more like shuffling than anything else though.  A great many U.S. workers are stuck in jobs they do not like and are not good at.  A basic income will allow them to quit those jobs, opening their positions for people who do want them and are good at them.  The result will be a shuffling around of jobs that ultimately makes people happier and more productive.  Some will not return to work, but most of those will either start new businesses or move to more economically valuable unpaid work, like caring for dependents.  The evidence of this is strong, from a number of basic income experiments.  The evidence also shows that currently unemployed people are more likely to work when they have a basic income, if work is available, and if it is not, they are more likely to pursue education to become qualified in work that is available.  The fact is, the biggest con of a basic income is the cost, and in the long run the economic improvement and lower law enforcement and judicial costs associated with less crime will end up covering most or even all of that.  In addition, the cost of a basic income can be easily mitigated with a progressive recovery tax designed to recover most (but not all) of the basic income from those who already have high incomes.  In short, a well designed basic income program can actually provide a net gain in the long run.

The main point here is that basic income is a well tested and proven idea, and our current situation has made it very clear that our current welfare is insufficient and a Federal Job Guarantee would be an equally poor substitute.  With a basic income, the $2 trillion stimulus package would be largely unnecessary.  Yes, a Federal Job Guarantee with as-needed stimulus packages might be able to accomplish the same thing for the majority of those in need, but a system that requires massive government borrowing every time there is some minor global disaster is a poorly designed a system.  A well designed system would have been able to handle the economic and financial issues of the current situation without any additional action from Congress.  The fact that a stimulus package is deemed necessary is evidence of the weakness and fragility of our economy, including the labor portion.  Our current welfare system has utterly failed to handle the situation.  A Federal Job Guarantee would fail just as dramatically if not significantly more dramatically.  A basic income, however, would already be here, helping the people meet their needs, without any additional government intervention.  A basic income is the enlightened solution to our current problem and many future problems we are bound to encounter.  The only true weakness it has is that it cannot be implemented any faster than the recently passed stimulus bill.  Had we concerned ourselves just a little bit more with future, instead of deluding ourselves into believing we were too big and powerful to fall, perhaps we would already have one.  It is not too late to start though.  Yes, we will suffer for our refusal to look beyond the current moment, but we will recover, and with a basic income we will recover faster and be more resilient in the future.

The Real Math Behind a Federal Job Guarantee

The estimated cost of a Federal Job Guarantee is $543 billion a year.  This number makes a lot of assumptions though, most of which are invalid, and it ignores substantial additional costs.

The current Federal Job Guarantee proposals promise to provide a job for anyone who wants one, at $15 an hour up to 40 hours a week.  The above estimate assumes 81% of unemployed people want full-time work and 19% want part-time work, but basing the budget on the assumption that these will stay the same forever is unwise.  Also, it really does not make a huge difference, once you add in other factors.

An estimated 5.9 million people actively seeking jobs were unemployed last year.  Full-time, at $15 an hour, their wages would cost $184 billion a year.  That is not a whole lot, compared to the ~$800 billion we are spending on other non-medical welfare.  That ignores 400,000 who were recently considered unemployed but have quit looking, call "discouraged workers" by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Include those, and you get a net wage cost of $197 billion.  What about the claim that there are 95 million U.S. adults who could be working but are not?  It turns out a lot of these people do not want jobs.  Over 44 million are retired people.  Most of the remainder are going to college or caring for children or elderly relatives.  A small portion either just do not want to work or are not working for unknown reasons.  It turns out that around 7.9 million able bodied adults in the U.S. are not working either because they cannot find work or because they are just not motivated to work.  A $15 guaranteed wage might be able to convince all 7.9 million to work though, at a wage cost of $246 billion a year.  What about the rest of the 95 million people though?  Would some of them be convinced to work as well, by this?  Many college students do work part-time or even full-time in addition to school, but it is generally difficult for college students to find flexible jobs that can accommodate their class schedules.  Many retired people work part-time for the medical benefits and for a little extra spending money.  Even some people who take care of family members find time to work around that care, when flexible jobs are available.  No Federal job program could reasonably be considered a job guarantee, if it did not do everything it could to work with people who need specialized or flexible schedules.  It would be unreasonable to expect that a Federal Job Guarantee offering $15 an hour would not be taken advantage of by a significant portion of the 87 million people who are not working, because they are doing other, more important things that few employers are willing to accommodate.  What if this demographic takes advantage of the Federal Job Guarantee for an average of 15 hours a week?  (Many retirees will just go for 10, but many will take 20 to 30 hours, if schedules are sufficiently flexible.)  Now we are looking at a $1.27 trillion program, just for wages.

As mentioned above, the initial estimate also ignores substantial additional costs.  The wage cost of a Federal Job Guarantee is very likely to be at least $1 trillion a year.  What about administration though?  Someone has to manage hiring, job placement, human resources, project logistics, acquisition, and a ton of other things.  This is not like running a company.  This is like running a hundred or a thousand companies, and it will require administrative management capable of running that many companies.  We are talking administrative costs on the order of another $1 trillion a year.  To be clear, this is a low ball estimate.  The Federal government currently spends $800 billion a year on non-medical welfare.  Somewhere between $500 billion and $600 billion of that is going into administrative costs, and that is mostly just paying people to check work verifications, look up tax records, and check bank accounts, to make sure applicants actually meet the requirements.  The actual administrative costs for a Federal Job Guarantee would probably be several trillion.

Another major cost of a Federal job guarantee is going to be materials.  The intent for the Federal Job Guarantee programs suggested is to provide jobs where people will work on government infrastructure projects.  The low hanging fruit here is maintaining and expanding the interstate highway system.  Other suggestions include the construction of a transcontinental bullet train system, ecological restoration (ie, cleaning up Federal parks and highways), care giving (nursing home jobs), and "community development projects" (whatever local governments want, probably including creating new parks, building new government and community buildings, and "beautification" projects).  None of these are free, and most require a lot of materials.  Obviously roads and bullet train systems are going to cost far more in materials than labor, especially at only $15 an hour for labor.  Ecological restoration will vary dramatically.  Mere highway cleanup will incur transportation cost and cost for garbage bags and dumping.  If the effort also includes removing vehicle by products from nearby soil, the non-labor cost could skyrocket.  Care giving often appears to be a very labor intensive job, and while it is, labor is still not the biggest expense.  The expenses also include food, medication, and shelter, which can easily outstrip a $15 an hour wage.  This is especially true for nursing homes where there may be only one caregiver for up to 5 or 10 people.  Community development projects will also almost certainly cost more in materials and such than in wages.  Again, let's lowball this and say the average materials cost comes out to about the same as wages, for another $1 trillion.

We cannot just hire as many as 30 million people, tell them what projects they are on, and expect them to complete them.  Each project is going it need its own project planners, which will likely expect a number of experts working together.  In addition, each project will likely need a few highly trained people on-site as well as supervisors to manage the unskilled laborers.  These people are not going to be getting paid only $15 an hour, and some will demand compensation far greater.  Road repair crews tend to have between 5 and 10 people.  At least one of those is trained well enough in road construction and repaid to instruct the others.  Road construction crews can be a bit bigger, but with modern equipment, they do not need to be much bigger.  Construction crews typically also need additional people trained and experienced in the use of the heavier equipment.  We are looking at 10% to 20% of laborers on road infrastructure projects being well trained, with wages running at least $20 an hour.  Supervisors for bullet train systems will cost far more than even that, and they will also require some engineers to manage the construction and to assemble the electrical components, who will have to paid more than five times what the "job guarantee" people are getting.  Clean up crews could have much less supervision, but other ecological restoration projects will require supervisors and managers with far more training and far larger salaries (on the order of two to four times what the "job guarantee" employees are being paid).  Care facilities generally require a number of trained CNAs to be on staff, who may cost as much as $25 an hour, and government run facilities are likely to require at least one (and as many as four, if full shift coverage is required) registered nurse or certified nurse practitioner on staff, with a salary between $60,000 and $120,000 (two to four times what the "job guarantee" people are getting paid).  Community development projects will vary dramatically.  Building construction will require foremen, contracting services, and trained specialists.  Electrical and plumbing cannot legally be done by anyone who is not licensed to do those.  While jobs like insulating do not generally require licenses, it is still going to be necessary to have experienced supervisors to make sure the work meets building code requirements.  Beautification projects will require landscape architects (1.5 to 4 times the cost), horticulturalists (1.5 to 2 times the cost), and other trained and experienced people to manage the work.  Most of this is just the on site stuff, as well.  There will also need to be significant office management to manage budgets and to work with on site experts and supervisors to make sure everything is following the plans and to adapt to unforeseen events.  All of these additional supervisors, managers, and experts are in addition to the people working under the job guarantee program.  This is probably going to cost around another $1 trillion.

So far, the cost is already up to $4 trillion, and this is a lowball.  This estimate also does not include a large number of fairly small costs that will likely add up to something on the order of at least another trillion dollars, nor does it take into account the cost of benefits.  Current proposals also include healthcare benefits as part of the package, and those are unlikely to scale much with work hours.  This means that retired people who only work 10 hours a week, so they can get the healthcare coverage are going to cost the same for that coverage as full-time workers, and they are more likely to need to use it, making them a greater cost for healthcare benefits than full-time workers.  On top of that, the $15 wage and healthcare benefits will likely draw far more people to the program than just what we have considered above.  Currently, 54 million workers are being paid less than $15 an hour, and at least several million more making up to $18 an hour or more working part time do not have healthcare benefits.  That is another $2 trillion or more just in wages and benefits the government will end up spending on the program, as well as similar amounts each for administration, materials, and managements.  The reality is that the minimum cost for a Federal Job Guarantee program will almost certainly be more than $4 trillion, and it could easily cost as much as $15 trillion or more.

A Federal Job Guarantee can hardly guarantee anyone a job, and the price tag is not some measly $500 billion.  The math suggests a cost somewhere around $10 trillion, and even a $15 minimum wage to remove incentive for lower paid people to switch would not be enough, because $15 an hour jobs do not generally include healthcare benefits.  Federal welfare programs do not cost only what beneficiaries get.  They typically cost several times that, and a Federal Job Guarantee is no different.  Again, the math shows a net cost between $4 trillion and $15 trillion, with the most likely cost being around $9 trillion and $10 trillion.  A Federal Job Guarantee is a bad idea.

Next Level Trolling

Trolls are often considered the scum of the internet.  They deliberately incite arguments and other hostile communications.  They argue just to argue.  They make the internet a worse place, for their own personal amusement.  Only, this is not universally true.  Not all trolls make it their goal to incite hostilities so they can sit back and watch the world burn.  The trolls described above are merely the common, vulgar trolls.  While the vulgar troll is certainly the most common kind of troll, there is another level of troll that is more sophisticated, that trolls for a purpose other than personal entertainment.

The most common purpose of trolling is to cause contention for personal entertainment, but trolling can have a higher purpose.  Trolling can be used to extract information.  It can be used to learn people's motivations and how they think.  It can be used to find out the sources of their information and the biases that they use to support their opinions and beliefs.  It can be used to drag false beliefs into the light, and it can even be used to teach.  Higher level trolls do not use their powers for personal entertainment, though it can be entertaining.  They use their powers to help others and to learn more about people.

As a personal example, I once trolled in the Google comments, in a thread discussing the health implications of GMO foods.  If you are familiar with my articles, you may be aware that I wrote a few articles on GMOs a while back, and if you have read them, you will also be aware that I am strongly pro-GMO, because GMOs are important for increasing crop yield and nutrient content of foods, which are going to grow in importance as Earth's human population continues to grow.  In this thread, there were a handful of anti-GMO people spreading lies and misconceptions about GMO foods, but there were also a lot of legitimately curious people who wanted to learn more.  Due to the loud anti-GMO people, it was impossible to engage with those who wanted to learn.  Thus the trolling began.  I started by engaging the anti-GMO.  I expressed my opinion that GMOs are generally harmless and that the FDA already does a good job of making sure all GMOs going into human food are tested rather excessively for safety.  This was, of course, met with many examples of places that GMOs had caused harm to people, the most prominent of which was a case where GMO baby formula harmed many babies.  I responded by demanding sources for these claims.  Before that, I Googled each of the claims and verified that they were all false.  They were lies made up by poorly educated anti-GMO authors to demonize GMOs, since there are actually no cases of GMOs harming humans.  I did not want to call the anti-GMO people out on this though.  I was fishing deeper, for bigger fish.  Merely asking for sources verifying claims was enough to send most of the anti-GMO crowd into hiding.  Only one person was brave enough (or foolish enough, perhaps) to respond.  This person began making additional claims of instances where GMOs had caused harm, none of which were verifiable.  After each claim, I demanded sources.  At one point, I specifically said that I wanted sources who are well educated in genetic engineering and well researched on the impact of GMOs on human health.  I specifically said I was not interested in journalists or fanatics who do not know the science.  After many demands for sources, this person finally gave me a name and the title of a book.  I instantly looked up the author on Wikipedia.  He was a journalist who mostly writes about oil economics, who was hired by an anti-GMO activist group to write a book attacking GMOs.  His credentials were a degree in journalism with some classes in economics.  He had no background in genetics or health.  He was exactly the kind of crummy source I had explicitly stated could not be considered a reliable source, and I immediately pointed this out.  I explained that the incredibly low quality of the source made anything the author wrote on GMOs suspect, and at this point I also pointed out that I could find no evidence supporting any of the claims of harm caused by GMOs.  The final anti-GMO commenter never responded again, but some of the people who actually wanted to learn more about GMOs did start to respond.  I went through the comments looking for specific concerns about GMOs, and then I wrote a couple of blog articles (the ones I referenced before) answering those questions and clearing up a lot of misconceptions about GMOs.  The final comment I left in that thread contained the links to those articles, for anyone interested in learning more about genetic engineering and GMOs.  Without the trolling, it would have been very difficult to identify specific, legitimate concerns people had.  The trolling allowed me to identify and push out of the conversation those who were more interested in arguing than learning.  Trolling was a critical element of providing a potentially very valuable public service.

I have also used trolling to shut down argumentative people (vulgar trolls) in discussions on religion, by leading them into a trap, where they made some absurd and invalid argument in an attempt to discredit a religion.  I have a friend who was trying to tie a person in a martial arts forum who was slandering his practice group on Facebook to a person in real life who had been badly beaten by members of my friend's group during sparing.  My friend used expert trolling skills to make the other guy angry enough to accidentally reveal bits and pieces of information that ultimately verified it was the same person.  I have used milder trolling just to see how people would respond to something, to learn more about how they think.

Vulgar internet trolls, who are just trying to entertain themselves, can be pretty annoying and can cause all sorts of problems and contention, but trolling does not have to be used for evil.  Trolling can even be used for noble pursuits, like shutting down vulgar trolls and learning what kind of information people need and want so you can provide it.  Trolling can even be part of a valuable public service.

Children Aren't Important?

I keep seeing this come up, and I do not understand why there is not more public outcry over it.  It started with Trump's tax reform.  Now, Trump's tax reform helped a lot of people.  It increased refunds for a lot of lower income working Americans.  Unfortunately, however, it also neglected children.  In a sense, it counted adults as worth more, reducing the total amount of refund for lower income working families with more children than average.  (We saw more than a 10% decrease in our refunds, despite getting a little more back from the EITC.)  After Trump it was Yang, with a Freedom Dividend plan that would have given adults a basic income worth around half of a living wage but just plain did not even count children as people.  Now we have plans for an economic stimulus package with a relief element for individuals, and yet again, children are being treated as unimportant.

Trump suggested an initial relief check for all American adults, with some kind of cutoff to avoid giving a lot of money to people who do not need it.  This is not a bad idea, except for the fact that children are rapidly increasing in value in the U.S. (as fertility rate decreases), and this plan straight up neglects children.  Of course, others immediately pointed this out, and Trump agreed with plans that provide smaller amounts for children.  Now, I am not complaining about the fact that the amount for children is smaller in some of these plans.  Household dynamics work fine this way, as the biggest cost for most families is rent or mortgage payments, and this scales much slower with family size than other necessities.  But now Mitt Romney has proposed a plan to the Senate that has reverted back to this adults-only thing.  Is it just Republicans or wealthy politicians, or do Americans in general consider children to be unimportant?  This is ironic, given how much resources state and Federal governments put into oppressing parents for even the most trivial things that might be disadvantageous for their children.

There are a number of potential excuses for denying children disaster relief when it is being provided to adults, but they are all wrong.  The first is that the relief given to parents will help their children.  This is not untrue, but unless everyone has the same number of children, it is overly simplistic and punishes larger families while rewarding single people and couples without children.  Punishing larger families right now is a really bad idea, and it happens to be the next topic of discussion.

The second excuse is that counting children will reward larger families for having more children.  I have two responses to this.  The first is, that is straight up false.  I heard the same argument when I lived in Alaska.  I once overheard some of my coworkers complaining that certain Russian families had large numbers of children, so they would get more money from the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend.  The largest payout I have ever seen from that is around $2,000 per person, and it pays out once a year.  (It has hovered around $1,600 the last two years.)  No offense to my coworkers, but anyone who thinks children cost less than $2,000 a year to provide for either has not had to provide for children or is in serious need of remedial math.  Even at the maximum payout, children do not turn a profit from the Alaska PFD.  (Note that I was one of 7 children, in my teens, living there.  My parents made enough to live comfortably but nothing more, and the PFD definitely did not cover all of the costs of 7 children, let alone turn a profit.)  The $500 per child suggested by some is only a quarter of that.  It would take more than $500 a month for most Americans to profit off of children*.  My second response is, is it wrong to reward parents for having more children?  Raising children is expensive, and it takes a lot of work.  If we wanted to be completely fair (especially to women), we would be paying at least $30k a year to stay-at-home moms with one child.  That is the long term babysitter average wage though, which only covers 40 hours a week.  Moms are more like nannies than babysitters, doing household chores, teaching children basic skills, and so on, on top of supervising and caring for children.  If we assume 14 hour days (children are recommended to sleep from 10 to 14 hours a day, depending on age), that comes out to $125k a year (average pay is $19/hr in the U.S.), if we do time and a half for overtime, with overtime being only anything over 40 hours a week.  (No, you can't pay babysitters or nannies salary.  They are non-exempt employees and thus must be paid hourly wages that comply with overtime laws.)  A nanny might be expected to care for one to three children at that pay.  $500 a kid, as a one or two time payment, is not actually a reward.  It is not even fair wages for services rendered!  And even if it somehow was profitable, encouraging people to have more children is not a bad thing right now.  The U.S. fertility rate is currently lower than 1.8 (average children per woman, in a lifetime).  The replacement rate is 2.1.  That means Americans are not having children at a high enough rate to sustain our own population.  Those panicked about overpopulation might see this as a good thing, but people who understand the economic impact of a declining population do not.  To maintain a healthy economy in the long term, it is important to maintain at least the replacement rate, and while immigration can help make up the difference, it is not a good long term solution, especially when Americans want stricter immigration regulation.  Not only is rewarding people for having more children not a bad thing, it is actually something we are going to have to do anyway, if we want to avoid long term economic decline.  The fact is, parents with large families should be treated as heroes for doing their part to slow the long term decline of the U.S. economy.  We should be happy to make children profitable for them, and they at least deserve some help with the costs of raising children, if not fair wages for the work.

(* I say most, because it might work in the lowest cost-of-living regions, for parents who are already covering a lot of needs through government welfare programs.  In this case though, it is not the $500 a month that is turning a profit but the $500 a month combined with the other welfare.  The $500 a month will never cover more than 100% of the costs of a child on its own.)

Now, I have never heard anyone argue that children are not as important as adults, as an excuse for only providing a basic income or disaster relief for adults and not children, but actions speak louder than words.  Clearly, Mitt Romney considers children to be worthless in comparison to adults.  The current House bill being crafted for relief does include children, but it also puts a cap on larger families.  A maximum of four children can be counted.  Families with more than four children, the true heroes, are out of luck.  Their children are counted at a value of four fifths or less of an adult each.  My value, as a teen with six siblings, would have been only 57% that of an adult.  Even a Democratic House somehow cannot manage to consider children as important as adults.  Yes, the House bill does pay out equal amounts for adults and children, but with a maximum family limit, it is still treating children as lower value, second class citizens.  It would be better to give children half the payout of adults, without a family cap.  (And yes, this would actually result in a smaller payout for my own family.  But at least it would treat children as equal, instead of devaluing children in larger families.)

The fact is, children are not just important.  They are critical.  We often hear the cliche that children are our future, a rather blatant statement of the obvious, but we do not seem to understand the extent of it.  Number are important.  Shrinking populations are populations in economic decline.  And immigration is not a long term solution, because they do not contribute significantly to an increase in the percentage of children.  The fact is, children need relief too.  If we cannot value our children enough to ensure their well being during this crisis, perhaps we deserve mass death and economic collapse.

Could Coronavirus Save the Economy?

First a disclaimer: This article is going to discuss the potential repercussions of a nationwide outbreak of COVID-19 in what may sound like a positive light.  This in no way means that I think such an outbreak would be good.  Given the estimated fatality rates, a nationwide outbreak would likely result in 2.3 million to 10 millions deaths, which would be tragic and horrific regardless of any positive effects it might have.  Even if such an event might have the potential for significant positive effects, the emotional value of the lives lost would far outweigh any positive effects it might cause.


COVID-19 has a death rate somewhere between 0.7% and 3%.  It has not spread enough outside China to get a solid count, but in China, the death rate is between 3% and 4% in a few places and 0.7% everywhere else.  Making a good estimate of the death rate would require knowing much finer details about these regions than we do, though certain organizations are estimating around 3% despite this lack of critical details.

COVID-19 affects adults far more dramatically than children.  Around 0.8% of deaths are in the 0-4 year old age range.  Only 0.6% are in the 5-18 year old age range.  Thus, minors in general are far less likely to die from the virus than adults.  The highest fatality rate is in the 65+ year old age range, with 72% of deaths falling within that age range.

Together these facts mean that a nationwide COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S. could cause as many as (given a 3% fatality rate) 79,200 deaths in the 0-4 age range, 59,400 deaths in the 5-18 age range, 2,633,400 deaths in the 19-64 age range, and 7,128,000 deaths in the 65+ age range.

China, Japan, and the U.S. are approaching economic decline or even disaster due to low birth rates.  This causes several problems, but one of the largest problems is that these countries have aging populations, where a much larger portion of the population is older people than younger people.  As this larger population of older people approaches retirement and various age related diseases, they are going to be contributing less to the economy, but they are going to need more care from it.  This means they will be contributing less labor while needing more, in a population where there are far more people needing labor than there are people capable of providing it.

COVID-19 promises some potential for improving the situation, however only at a horrific cost.  A nationwide COVID-19 outbreak in any of these countries will reduce the older, retiring population far more dramatically than the younger population (to be clear, it will do this by killing them, probably slowly and painfully).

In short, COVID-19 could save the economies of China, Japan, the U.S., and many other countries with low birth rates and aging populations.  Again though, this would come at a horrific cost.

Diversity of Government

I am not sure if I have written on this topic before, but if not, I have been negligent, as this is critical to democracy.  I was reminded to write about this by this article about vaccine refugees.  I have written about vaccination before, so I am not going to go into much depth on the subject here.  That article merely provides a good example of why diversity of government is so important.


To summarize the article, a handful of states have made it illegal for public schools to accept unvaccinated children without a medical exemption.  Many states still allow personal and/or religious exemptions, allowing parents to choose not to vaccinate for any reason, without excluding their children from public school.  A handful of parents in states that only honor medical exemptions have chosen to move to states with a higher degree of "medical freedom".  Alternatives are homeschooling or paying for a private school that does not require vaccinations.  In the context of this post, my personal position on all of this is irrelevant, so I am not going to share it here.  (Again, I have written about vaccination in the past.  If you want my opinion, it is available in other articles I have written.)


One of the biggest problems with democracy is that it can force up to 49.9% of the people to live under laws they do not agree with.  By default, democracy is the best form of government for ensuring that the largest number of people are content with the laws they live under, but democracy can only guarantee satisfaction with the law for half a person more than 50% of the population (for an odd numbered population; one person more for an even numbered population).  That means under a democratic government, almost half of the population can be living under laws they find unacceptable.  It gets worse though.  When you have hundreds or thousands of laws, it is trivial to get to a point where the majority of the population is opposed to almost half of the laws.  Consider, with two laws, 51% might approve of each, but the 49% that disapproves of one might all approve of the other.  That gives only a 2% overlap of people who approve of both, with 98% dissatisfied.  And that overlap can theoretically get as low as a single person, depending on the overarching form of government.  (In a democratic republic or a democratic constitutional monarchy, one person is less likely to make a difference than in a purer form of democracy, but that does not make the situation better.)  When you have three laws, you can end up in a position where 51% approves of each law, but 49% disapproves of two laws and the other 51% disapprove of one law.  That averages out to each individual disapproving of 1.49 laws, or 100% of the population disapproving of 49.7% of laws on average.  It is easy to end up in a situation where the majority is not opposed to any individual law, but the majority of individuals are opposed to almost half of the laws and are generally dissatisfied with the whole situation.  This can make a democratic nation an undesirable place to live for the vast majority of the population.  And that's in a pure democracy, where voters are not aggregated under elected representatives where 51% of the popular vote has the same value as 100% of the popular vote (which is the basis of gerrymandering to minimize the voting power of a particular group).  In representative systems like republics and constitutional monarchies, it is possible for laws to get passed that less than 50% of the people find acceptable (even when representatives do their jobs right).

When people complain about laws too much, the knee jerk reaction tends be words along the lines of, "You can always move somewhere else."  This is viewed as petty and rude, but not only is it often correct, it can sometimes be the most ethically responsible solution.  This is where diversity of government comes in.  While moving somewhere else is sometimes the right solution, it isn't always, nor is it always a solution at all.  Perhaps a family would like to live in a city where liquor laws are fairly strict, because they have a family history of alcoholism and would like to limit their children's exposure to alcohol.  Maybe another person teaches electric guitar as a side gig and wants to live in a city without noise ordinances that would prevent evening appointments.  What if national law governs liquor and forbids local regulation of liquor?  That family now has no city in the country that will be safe for their children.  What if there is a national noise ordinance that applies to all residences within some proximity of other residences?  Now the guitar teacher cannot teach guitar in addition to working a day job.  What if there are 100,000 people living in the country who want a city with stricter liquor laws than national law provides?  Sorry, they are out of luck.  They cannot even found their own city, where they can live under the laws they want.  What if there are 100,000 people who, for various reasons, want to live somewhere without noise ordinances?  Again, that is not an option.  These are not the only examples.  What about gambling?  How about recreational drug use?  Perhaps more controversial things, like abortion.  Maybe how much taxation goes into public education, or maybe even whether or not public education is mandatory in the first place.  Of course, mandatory vaccination is certainly near the top of the list.  And this is not just a problem with national laws.  What if a group of activists convinced every city government in the country that unregulated access to alcohol is a fundamental right, or maybe they convince every city government that unwanted noise infringes on their rights, and now there is not a single city anywhere that can accommodate these people.  Sorry, out of luck, because there is not somewhere else you can move to anymore.

This does not happen a lot in the U.S., because we have fairly high diversity of government.  This diversity is created by sharing of sovereignty between Federal and state governments.  The Constitution limits the powers of the Federal government to things that affect the nation as a whole and to regulation of interaction between states.  And while the Federal government has far overstepped these bounds, we still have a system where diversity of government is fairly high.  If you do not like the laws in your state, odds are good there is another state that would be more acceptable to you.  If you prescribe to the progressive theory that all children should be forced to attend public school, for the social benefit of other children, there are states where homeschooling and most private schooling is illegal.  If you want to homeschool, there are states that protect the right to homeschool.  As the article mentioned above demonstrates, if you want to live somewhere you know all of the kids in school will be vaccinated, there are states where you can get that, and if you do not want to be forced to vaccinate your kids as a condition of attending public school, there are states that give you that option.  The advantage of diversity in government is that like minded people can congregate under laws that are acceptable to them.  It is not perfect, and there will probably never be a place where even one person finds 100% of the laws acceptable, but a fair amount of diversity in government can at least provide the option for the vast majority of people to live under a set of laws where the majority of those laws are acceptable to them.

The problem with this system is that people tend to get stubbornly attached to their current location.  When that happens, and they don't like the laws they are living under, instead of finding a place to go that has more suitable laws, they tend to try to oppress those around them, believing that their ideal laws somehow trump the will of the majority.  Sometimes they even convince themselves that everyone everywhere should be forced to live according to their personal beliefs and opinions.  And this tends to lead to political polarization, as people with minority opinions talk louder to try to fool lawmakers into believing they have a majority and the majority, being convinced they are a minority, start doing the same thing.  And it gets even worse when people start projecting their own opinions on other people they share features with.  For example, twice as many women (50%) believe abortions should only be legal under special circumstances (woman's life in danger, rape, incest) than believe they should be entirely legal (24%) or entirely illegal (24%), and yet many feminists are convinced that the broad legalization of abortion is a good thing for the majority of women.  A full 74% of women disagree agree with that.  Not only is this projection completely wrong, democracy is not even about what is good for people.  It is about what people want, because no individual or small group has any right to decide what is best for everyone else.  (Ironically, fewer men (18%) believe abortion should be entirely illegal than women.)  Allowing governments to be diverse, by only attempting to change laws at the lowest level, is a critical factor in maintaining government diversity.  You might want to live under a particular set of laws, but that does not mean others do, even if they are the same gender, race, sexual orientation, or whatever as you are.  To maintain democratic rule in a way that is acceptable to everyone, each person must respect the desires of others, even of they do not seem to make sense.  This means respectfully staying out of local politics that do not affect your region.  Roe v. Wade is toxic to democracy, because it undermines the democratic power of men and women across our entire nation.  Because of that legislation by judicial fiat, the democratic right to live under the laws a group a people collectively prefer has been substantially reduced.  74% of women in America have lost the right to have any say on abortion law, because of Roe v. Wade.  Roe v. Wade significantly reduced diversity of government in one sphere, and that has caused a lot of people harm.

Diversity of government requires two things.  The first is respect for the opinions and desires of others, even when you do not agree with them.  The second is a willingness to live where the laws are acceptable to you, if you have the reasonable ability to live there.  Attempting to go "over the heads" of local government to force a political position undermines diversity of government, and that undermines democracy.  And attempting to force local government to agree with your view, where you could move somewhere else, with more like minded people, also undermines democracy and diversity.  This is especially true when you are attempting to get a local government to conform to what everyone else is doing, because it can cause a particular type of diversity to go extinct, eliminating the choice of anyone else to live under the laws they want.

Another good example of this is the city I live in, which actually has fairly strict liquor laws.  A student at the local university once wrote a persuasive essay on why the city should change its liquor laws to fall in line with cities across the U.S..  The problem with this position is that this student could live in any of those other cities, but people who live in this city do not have anywhere else to go to live under strict liquor laws, because there are extremely few cities in the U.S. with strict liquor laws.  Convincing this city to change its laws would reduce diversity in government, and in fact, reviewing this student's paper is where I first realized the importance of diversity of government.  I prefer living in a city with strict liquor laws, but I am not campaigning to convince other cities to adopt the same laws, and I am not trying to convince the Federal government to override them in favor of my position.  I respect the right of the people living in those cities to choose the laws they are going to live under.  I disagree with California's law eliminating all but medical exemptions for vaccines, but again, I respect the right of the people of California to live under that law, if they so choose.  I am not going to try to force my political position on you any more than I would try to force my religion on you, but I expect and deserve the same respect.

It is not showing me your respect, when you try to force laws on my region against the will of the people that live there.  If you want to show me respect, and if you want what is best for me, let me deal with it.  Let me vote for the laws I want in my region, instead of trying to force on me the laws you think I want or that would be best for me, by appealing to a higher government.  And this applies to everyone.  If you want to show respect for women, instead of trying to make abortion 100% legal and easily accessible in the U.S. mind your own business, and let the people of each state make their own choice about this.  If some of them do not like it, they can move to where the majority agrees with tham, and if some of the women there do not agree with the laws there, let them move where more people agree with them.  That is what respect is about.  It is not about imposing your position and your beliefs on everyone else or projecting your desires on everyone else.  For our country to get along well, and for democracy to even work at this scale, diversity of government is critical, and attempting to undermine it will only serve to increase toxic political polarization and partisanship.

Slavery Smells?

I am conservative, but I actually like Bernie Sanders.  I am no "Bernie Bro".  I certainly do not support all of Sanders' platform.  I think he has his head in the right place though, which is more than I can say for other Democratic Presidents.  But then, Sanders is not really a Democrat, is he?  Actually, no, he is not.  Sanders is more of a conservative socialist.  Conservative?  Really?  Yep, conservative.  Sanders' platform is actually not even close to liberal.  Medicare for All is certainly more conservative than a public option, which has little real world precedent or testing and would cause far more major change (the hallmark of liberalism) than Medicare for All.  His Federal job guarantee thing is actually more reactionary than even conservative, drawing from ideas that have arisen in different ways, multiple times throughout both American and world history.  Also, the Federal job guarantee is founded very firmly in the conservative/reactionary "work to live" culture, that preaches that people who are not doing productive work do not deserve to live (which I have written about before).

There is more to it than that though.  The Federal job guarantee idea stinks of slavery.  One of the most common justifications of slavery in the early U.S. was the assertion that slaves were people who were too dumb to get by on their own, so society had a responsibility to provide them with productive jobs that could satisfy their needs.  Many ancient civilizations mobilized the poor for building infrastructure, often against their will but also often voluntarily, using their poverty to coerce them into doing very grueling and sometimes deadly work that never carried any promise for advancement.  In the U.S., when we hear the word "slavery" we tend to imagine people legally owned by other people and forced into manual labor by their masters, but this "chattel" slavery is actually not as historically common as other types of slavery.  The most common types of slavery are more similar to feudalism, where the "serfs" are technically under an inherited contract to work the land and provide a portion of the harvest to the landowner.  In some regions and time periods, serfs could even terminate the contract at will, making them free to leave.  Few, if any, ever did though, because they could not afford to.  The land always belonged to the governing lord or to the national government.  A serf could not cancel a contract and continue to work the land for his or her own personal benefit.  A serf that bailed out would never find a lord willing to agree to a work contract again.  Serfs were not trained in commerce or productive crafts.  The experience of a lifetime of farm work was only valuable for farm work, and as mentioned before, no lord would take a serf that had canceled a contract.  Serfs were de facto slaves.  No, they were not owned.  They were either permanently contracted to their plot of land, or they were free but permanently attached to the land by their own poverty.

The most common type of slave, historically, was agricultural slave, but most ancient nations employed some form of slavery in nearly all infrastructure work.  Infrastructure work was typically to grueling and dangerous for free people who were not in poverty to be willing to do.  So, governments would instead either buy slaves or advertise infrastructure work to the destitute, who had no other choice but to take any work offered, because they would starve otherwise.  Taskmasters often felt justified in abusing even voluntary infrastructure workers, because they were poor, and the poor have always been viewed as justified targets of mistreatment.  Even in the modern U.S., the poor are common targets of law enforcement and legislative abuse.  The Federal job guarantee, which is supposed to provide the poor with infrastructure jobs, just reeks of the sort of slavery that has been used throughout history to build up the infrastructure of the vast majority of historical nations.

It is actually unsurprising that the Democratic Party would be the biggest proponent of such a program.  It was, after all, the political party created expressly for the purpose of defending slavery.  It may have changed a lot over the last 192 years, but clearly the underlying ideology that some people are too dumb to take care of themselves without heavy intervention is still there, and it seems to be leading toward a type of slavery that is fairly new in the U.S. but that has been the most common type of slavery historically.

There are a ton of problems with the Federal job guarantee program.  The first is that it only really helps the poor that need it the least.  A Federal job guarantee would only help able bodied and able minded people who can get regular jobs fairly easily.  It will not help most people with physical or mental disabilities that make it hard to get or keep a regular job.  Much like Obamacare, which attempted to force people to buy health insurance, a Federal job guarantee has a lot of holes people will slip through, and most of those holes are neatly lined up with the holes in the existing system.  It will help some people, but the vast majority will be people who do not actually need the help, and it will not serve most of the people who do need the help.

The second problem with the Federal job guarantee is mistreatment.  Mistreatment of slaves, while not actually as common as people often assume, has always been common, especially of non-chattel slaves in infrastructure work.  (Slave owners typically treated their slaves quite humanely, because they paid significant amounts of money for them, making slaves a valuable investment.  Infrastructure slaves, however, were typically not legally owned and were considered expendable, eliminating most motivation for good treatment.)  Abuse of prisoners in the U.S. is quite common.  There is no reason to believe that overseers for poor people taking advantage of a Federal job guarantee will not also engage in mistreatment.  And no, there will not be enough oversight to prevent it.  Law enforcement abuse of the free poor in the U.S. is rampant, but it rarely gets reported, because poor people cannot afford Federal law suits, and when it does get reported, courts consistently trust police over poor people, often regardless of evidence.  There is no reason to believe abuse of poor infrastructure workers is any more likely to be reported.

The third problem with the Federal job guarantee program is that it does not even solve the problem it is supposedly intended to solve.  The Federal job guarantee program is an alternative to a basic income, which is typically justified on the idea that automation is going to rapidly reduce the availability of jobs in the U.S. (and Sanders has even directly presented the Federal job guarantee as a solution for growing automation).  A Federal job guarantee will only delay that.  The reason we need a lot of infrastructure work in the U.S. is that we have neglected infrastructure for over a generation.  We might have a few decades of infrastructure work to catch up, but once we are caught up, the need for work will drop very dramatically.  In addition, automation is not going to ignore infrastructure.  If we are getting self driving cars in the next decade, you can be sure we are also going to get self driving paving vehicles.  We already have concrete extruding technology that could be adapted to making side walks and constructing bridges with minimal human intervention.  Even things like laying bullet train tracks could be partially automated.  And automation is only going to get cheaper.  Eventually, the Federal job guarantee will be reduced to low value or no value work that would be better to let the private sector handle and that ends up being more wasteful (and thus expensive) than our current disaster of a welfare system.

The fourth problem is that some of the specifics of the infrastructure candidates are talking about are either nonsensical or just straight up harmful.  Sanders likes to talk about "environmentally friendly" infrastructure projects, like wind and solar power arrays, but more and more evidence is showing these technologies to generally be more harmful than clean fossil fuel power generation like natural gas, in no small part because they require more traditional energy production methods to provide reliable power (often dirty coal, to mitigate the high costs of wind and solar power).  Both wind and solar power, at large scale, pose a serious threat to wildlife.  When asked about these issues, politicians blow the harm off as minimal, because our current systems do not do a lot of net harm.  This is because the vast majority of the nation is still running on fossil fuel or nuclear power though.  If we phase these out and replace them with wind and solar, our current wind and solar infrastructure is going to balloon into something enormous, and these trivial amounts of wildlife being harmed will also balloon into something enormous.  We are talking potential extinctions of multiple species of birds and land animals.  Just small scale solar arrays we have already built have significantly impacted at least one endangered species, and proposed solar arrays in other places are causing experts serious concern about potential extinction of endangered species.  And these arrays are in deserts, where there is generally less wildlife to be concerned about in the first place.  In short, candidates advocating for the Federal job guarantee are planning to use it to build infrastructure that will definitely do massive environmental harm and has a high potential for causing extinctions of already endangered species.

The fifth problem with the Federal job guarantee is that it is likely to have a serious negative effect on the economy.  With or without an increase in minimum wage, the Federal job guarantee will likely create more stable jobs than the low end of the private sector.  This might help the workers who take advantage of it, but it will destroy existing lower end businesses, on a massive scale.  If the Federal job guarantee pays a higher wage than the minimum wage, it will not just attract poor people who are having a hard time finding a job.  It will attract millions of people who already have jobs, leaving the businesses they were originally working for without workers.  This will either cause them to go out of business or massively accelerate the automation of lower end jobs.  If the Federal job guarantee only pays minimum wage, regardless of whether the minimum wage is changed as part of the deal, it will still destroy the lower end of the economy.  A Federal job guarantee will provide full time work, at at least minimum wage, guaranteed.  This is way better than a job at say, McDonald's, where you will be lucky to get more than 20 hours a week, and you can be fired at the whim of practically anyone above you.  If a Federal job guarantee bill passes, be prepared for pretty much all fast food, most big box stores (Walmart, Fred Meyers, Ikea, etc...), and most small businesses (currently the largest source of employment in the U.S.) to either go under or automate at least 99% of their processes.  A Federal job guarantee might provide jobs for everyone, but once the dust settles, there might be a lot less available for people to buy with the money they are making, and in the long run, it will guarantee that there will be far fewer private sector jobs available.

The sixth problem with a Federal job guarantee is that it comes with very limited potential for advancement.  Most infrastructure work requires a very small number of experts and a huge amount of grunt labor.  Building roads and assembling power plants provides experience in skills that have little value outside of building roads and assembling power plants, and when the government has a monopoly on infrastructure work, there is not going to be much competitive demand for those skills.  The cost of a Federal job guarantee will be so high, especially in administration, that there will be a very strong incentive to avoid paying anyone much more than minimum wage.  And as the cost of automation drops, there will be an even stronger incentive to keep wages low, because if automation becomes cheaper than wages, the whole system will fall apart.  At that point, if the government does not automate, the private sector will, and then it will be cheaper for local and state governments to employ private companies instead of contributing jobs to the Federal job guarantee, and Congress might even decide to save money by reducing the scope of the Federal job guarantee and paying private companies to do the infrastructure work, leaving a bunch of people with highly trained skills in fields that are nearly 100% automated and no longer need any human labor.  If a Federal job guarantee cannot provide advancement opportunities and eliminates a lot of jobs that do have those opportunities, that is a very distinct backsliding, that will only serve to keep poor people poor, just like our current welfare system.



These are only the top six problems with the Federal job guarantee, and it really bothers me that Sanders and other Democratic candidates cannot see this.  This is an ancient idea that did get stuff done, but it did so at the expense of the poor, not to the benefit of the poor.  Adjusting it by making the wages higher is not going to help, and any Federal job guarantee that ends up giving people a better deal than private businesses can offer is going to do extreme damage to the economy.  The advantage with mistreating the slaves is that anyone who can get a job in the private sector will do it, but while some mistreatment will almost certainly occur, in our current culture it probably will not be enough to prevent a mass exodus from private sector jobs, and when the Federal job guarantee inevitably ends, because the government can no longer afford the administrative costs of paying a large portion of the population to be unproductive, America will find itself in deeper poverty than it has ever been in, in its entire history, because there will not be any jobs for the poor.

There was a time when Sanders at least liked the idea of a basic income.  That is the Sanders I might be willing to vote for, despite being a conservative.  (Of course, basic income is actually a conservative idea at this point.  It has been tested and proven repeatedly, and half a century ago, the right almost passed a basic income bill in the U.S..  Basic income is not a new and risky, liberal idea anymore.  It is a tried and tested idea with a great deal of proven benefits and thus far no significant downsides.)  I am not sure I can vote for a candidate who plans on destroying both the environment and the economy with a Federal job guarantee that amounts to the revival of ancient infrastructure slavery.  When did Sanders bail out on his dedication to the well being of the people, and join the side of the political machine that sees people as nothing more than tools of the government?