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"he premise is that everyone should be entitled to a good job, one that pays at least $15 an hour and comes with benefits such as health care, family leave policies and child care. The program would be administered at a local level, with federal funding, and jobs would be fitted to people, not the other way around. The aim "is not to change the worker in some fundamental way," said Stephanie Kelton, a professor of public policy and economics at Stony Brook University and formerly a senior advisor to Sanders. "You take the worker the way they are and you fit the job to the worker.""

"I like this piece by Kate Aronoff looking back on WPA "boondoggles" in the context of a suddenly much discussed job guarantee. A lot of people deserve congratulations for the suddenly much-discussedness of job guarantee proposals. People like William Darity, Darrick Hamilton, and Mark Paul, Pavlina Tcherneva, Randy Wray, and others have worked doggedly through years of winter to keep this (by no means new) idea alive while no major political faction in the United States was willing to give it the time of day. Now, all of a sudden, Democratic Party(ish) bigwigs including Kristen Gillibrand, Cory Booker, and Bernie Sanders are racing onto the bandwagon. Persistence pays (although perhaps not quite a living wage). Let's get this part out of the way. I'm for it, if it's well implemented. What about a UBI? I'm for that too, if it's well implemented. Do we need both? Well, they do complement each other: Pairing a job guarantee with a UBI would mitigate the risk that the "guarantee" would transmogrify under political pressure into a punitive workfare program. Pairing a UBI with a job guarantee would mitigate the risk that we neglect the broader project of integrating one another into a vibrant society, that we let a check in the mail substitute for human engagement. If we could get both a UBI and a JG, that'd be great. (Of course, if we did get both, we'd want the numbers to be different than either as a standalone.)"