A Promise So Big, Democrats Aren’t Sure How to Keep It
Jawan Thompson still sounds incredulous at his luck: He has a job, and a good job.
“My first time being incarcerated, I was 15 years old,” he said. “Since then, I’ve been incarcerated maybe four or five times—you know, getting out, being around bad influences and not making positive choices.” After he was released from his latest spell inside a few months ago—his charges over the years have included armed robbery, burglary, and drug dealing—a community corrections officer told him that there was a program that would help him out with a paying gig. “I was like, ‘Nah, it’s too good to be true.’ There’s not too many places that want to hire people like me, especially not younger people.”
In Indianapolis, there was one. RecycleForce takes IT equipment, retail electronics, and medical devices and breaks them down for safe recycling and disposal. The nonprofit’s workforce is largely made up of individuals who used to be incarcerated, their wages subsidized by the taxpayer. In effect, Uncle Sam got Thompson a $9-an-hour job. And if Democrats on the Hill have their way, Uncle Sam will, in the coming years, get a job for anyone who wants and needs one, anywhere in the country, for any reason.
This radical idea is called a jobs guarantee, and Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Cory Booker of New Jersey have in the past few weeks come out in support of it. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, another 2020 presidential aspirant, stands behind the idea too. Representative Ro Khanna, who represents much of Silicon Valley, has legislation providing a government jobs guarantee forthcoming in the House, he told The Atlantic. The most powerful think tanks on the left—including the wonkish Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the politically attuned Center for American Progress, and the progressive Levy Economics Institute of Bard College—have published jobs-guarantee policies or are planning to do so. A blue-sky policy idea has become an animating policy mandate in a matter of months.
The impulse is a radical one, with policymakers spurred to action by the incremental progress of the Obama years, the polarization and obstinacy of the right, the shock election of Donald Trump, the leftward ideological march of younger voters, and the decades of economic stagnation afflicting lower-income voters. “We have been a society, for generations, that has had this fundamental belief that if you’re willing to work hard, if you’re willing to put in the grit and the struggle, you should be able to thrive and make it in America,” Booker told me. “When you have the kind of societal
