Letting the Economy Create Jobs for Everyone Is (Sadly) Radical
Everyone in American politics believes that jobs should be plentiful and wages should be high — they just disagree about how to achieve those outcomes.
When Republicans lambaste Joe Biden’s proposed corporate-tax hike, they do not warn of smaller dividends for shareholders but rather fewer jobs and lower wages for working people. And when Democrats advocate for their president’s climate plan, they don’t promise higher returns for green investors but good-paying jobs for blue-collar laborers. In fact, it can be hard to find an argument for or against any economic policy — whether delivered on the campaign trail or in Congress, by a liberal or a conservative — that doesn’t at least tacitly stipulate that jobs should be abundant and public policy has a role to play in producing such abundance (if only by getting “big government” out of the job creators’ way).
And yet, if the pursuit of maximum employment is an uncontroversial aim in the context of American oratory, it is a radical one in the context of U.S. policy. For the bulk of the past four decades, our government hasn’t merely declined to achieve full employment through public hiring; it has actively sought to keep millions of Americans perpetually unemployed.
