Bernie Sanders has a plan to put every American to work – for the United States government. Once again, Sanders thinks big government is the answer to a problem.
Jeff Stein writes at the Washington Post:
Bernie Sanders to announce plan to guarantee every American a jobSen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will announce a plan for the federal government to guarantee a job paying $15 an hour and health-care benefits to every American worker “who wants or needs one,” embracing the kind of large-scale government works project that Democrats have shied away from in recent decades.Sanders’s jobs guarantee would fund hundreds of projects throughout the United States aimed at addressing priorities such as infrastructure, care giving, the environment, education and other goals. Under the job guarantee, every American would be entitled to a job under one of these projects or receive job training to be able to do so, according to an early draft of the proposal.
Reality sets in quickly:
A representative from Sanders’s office said they had not yet done a cost estimate for the plan or decided how it would be funded, saying they were still crafting the proposal.
This passage ignores the fact that businesses can’t compete with the government:
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. Supporters say it also would reduce racial inequality, because black workers face unemployment at about twice the rates of white workers, as well as gender inequality, because many iterations of the plan call for the expansion of federal child-care work.
Here are a few predictions of what would follow such a program. These workers would eventually insist on unionizing. Then they would strike and protest demanding a government pension which they would get.
The union would also raise money and campaign exclusively for Democrats, the party of bigger government. In turn, Democrats would pander to them in every election.
Emily Zanotti of the Daily Wire reminds us that we’ve seen this movie before:
Weirdly, the plan also includes dividing the country into 12 separate “districts” within the United States, each with a specialized area of industry, that would develop service projects and major infrastructure job plans, which they would then forward to the Department of Labor for approval.Sanders and his staff, weirdly, did not seem to notice that their draft “guarantee” program was pulled straight from the dystopian “Hunger Games” novels.
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