SENATE BILL: Job Guarantee Act of 2014 (Failed)

[Adam Griffin]

What is the current federal minimum wage? I can't remember if we dropped it last year, or if that was just an amendment that allowed each region to lower the minimum wage to a certain point.

[Adam Griffin]

What is the current federal minimum wage? I can't remember if we dropped it last year, or if that was just an amendment that allowed each region to lower the minimum wage to a certain point.

$12.50

So neither of us are GMs anymore, but have you tried estimating what this would cost? I don't see us getting out for under a half-trillion annually under the current proposal (assuming a long-term average of around 12,000,000 people being guaranteed a job).

[Adam Griffin]

What is the current federal minimum wage? I can't remember if we dropped it last year, or if that was just an amendment that allowed each region to lower the minimum wage to a certain point.

$12.50

So neither of us are GMs anymore, but have you tried estimating what this would cost? I don't see us getting out for under a half-trillion annually under the current proposal (assuming a long-term average of around 12,000,000 people being guaranteed a job).

Each job would be $30K/yr or so, but I don't know how many jobs we are supposed to provide, I'm having trouble imagining how this is supposed to work.  Will the government's proportion of the labor market keep expanding as it attempts to guarantee a good job for every person, and taxes the private sector in order to do it?   Also we'd need to consider the amount of capital investment to provide this meaningful work, whatever it is.

My calculations had it closer to $50k (the proposal states that it's a minimum of $22.50/hr), assuming full-time employment. And yes, these are obviously just labor costs.

[Adam Griffin]

We really need an assessment of how much in expenditures we've added to our budget since Nix left office. It seems like lately we've been throwing around tens and hundreds of billions of dollars in additional annual expenditures like it's candy. Sooner or later, we're going to run out of idle capital to tax.

I support this, but if the goal is full employment at $40,000 per year per person, then we need to go back through some elements of our social safety net, eliminate those and use it to pay for this. After all, if people can obtain employment with a living wage, there'd be a whole hell of a lot less need for some elements of our safety net.

[Adam Griffin]

Nay

Sorry, but something of this magnitude needs more debate, more budget analysis and more...well, everything.