I don’t want to keep writing about the job guarantee (JG), but I feel like I owe a response to Max Sawicky’s piece on the subject.

Before getting into his article, it is helpful to again restate my main criticism of the idea, the one I have been making for three years now (over and over and over and over). My main criticism is that the kinds of jobs that are appropriate for the program are not very good jobs and that advocates consistently claim that they will be able to do jobs that they can’t actually do.

This criticism is aimed at the canonical JG proposal that says that the program’s intent is to set a fixed minimum wage and act as an employer of last resort (ELR) for the bottom of the labor market. Importantly for this post, the fixed minimum wage is key to the canonical JG’s design because it allegedly allows private employers to hold down the inflationary wage demands of their own workers by being able to hire out of the JG labor pool with ease. For as long as the JG wage is fixed, all the private employers have to do if their workers get too demanding is undercut them by offering a JG worker a wage above the set JG wage, knowing that the JG office will not counteroffer to try to hold on to their workers.