Jobs Guarantee pilot program in 5 cities

The mandate for the Federal Reserve is to promote full employment and price stability. A relatively new school of macroeconomic thought, Modern Monetary Theory, presents a way to do so. It is known as the Job Guarantee.

Using the powers of the Federal Reserve to create money, in the same way it created $3T to bail out the banks, we could fund transition jobs for everyone who wants a job, but cannot find one in the private economy (see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-santens/the-job-market-a-game-of-_b_7581704.html).

The injection of money into the local economy in the form of wages for the Jobs Guarantee would cause an increase in spending at local businesses, which would hire more workers in response, reducing the cost of the Jobs Guarantee program. Jobs Guarantee workers would no longer be eligible for public benefits, since they would no longer be poor. And because they would have incomes, the Jobs Guarantee workers would become taxpayers. All these effects mean that the net cost of Jobs Guarantee is far less than the wages and benefits of the program.

There are many non-financial benefits as well. Eliminating unemployment completely means that millions more people will have jobs and incomes, and become self-supporting. This should lead to dramatic reductions in crime and drug use, and improvements in health (see: https://medium.com/utopia-for-realists/why-do-the-poor-make-such-poor-decisions-f05d84c44f1a#.3fwp9rw87).

There is much written about Jobs Guarantee, including what the wage rate and benefit package should be, how the program should be administered, what sorts of things the workers would do, how it would affect local private sector wage rates, and other considerations. See the following resources for more information:
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2012/03/mmp-blog-43-job-guarantee-basics-design-and-advantages.html
https://vimeo.com/83813741

Without the Job Guarantee, the legislated minimum wage is a lie. The true minimum wage is zero—if you cannot find a minimum wage job, you get a zero wage.