Saturday, May 19, 2018

Sandwichman — Jobs, Jobs, Jobs -- GUARANTEED!


Some useful history as background, but still no addressing the basic issue directly — buffer stock of employed or buffer stock of unemployed.

Absent a truly socialistic system, this is the key issue to address. The rest is detail.

Based on efficiency and effectiveness, a full employment economy is optimal. Redefinition of "full employment" to include millions of people out of work or not working full time when they desire a full time job is a lame excuse for a buffer stock of unemployed or underemployed.

Once it is admitted that idling works as a tool to target inflation based on NAIRU is bad idea, then the question becomes how to craft a bill to address this successfully

Actually, it was already addressed and passed in Humphrey-Hawkins, but that bill was ineffective.

The US needs an effective law to address chronic unemployment and underemployment.

Econospeak
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs -- GUARANTEED!
Sandwichman

8 comments:

Konrad said...

We already have a jobs guarantee for the CEOs and executives of military contractors. They receive almost $1 trillion per year, and each year they get $80 billon more than the previous year from the U.S. government.

We need a more equitable distribution of what we already have. We need a government that works for everyone, not just for the rich.

As a nation, we could solve all our problems quickly and easily if we really wanted to.

Matt Franko said...

There is allegedly over 6 million jobs currently available :

https://www.google.com/amp/s/wtop.com/national/2018/05/us-employers-post-record-high-6-6-million-open-jobs/amp/

AXEC / E.K-H said...

Progressive shell games
Comment on Sandwichman’s “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs ― GUARANTEED!”

Sandwichman reports what Kalecki, Keynes, Beveridge, Collins, and many others have said about full employment, unemployment, leisure, and the general strike. This historical review is pointless because it tells us only what people have hallucinated about the labor market. Never do we get the scientifically correct answer how overall employment is determined.

Neither Kalecki, nor Keynes, nor the rest of gossip economists ever understood how the price- and profit-mechanism works.#1, #2 Because of this, their policy guidance never had valid scientific foundations and never rose above the trivialities of common sense, folk psychology, and populism.

MMT is not different in this respect.#3

The noteworthy feature of the MMT Job Guarantee proposal is NOT that it is particularly innovative or institutionally superior but that it is financed by deficit spending. And exactly at this point the political fraud comes in.

According to the axiomatically correct Profit Law it always holds Public Deficit = Private Profit. Therefore, MMT is a program for the one-percenters and NOT for the ninety-nine-percenters, or the working class, or the proletariat. It is NOT the Job Guarantee that is specific to MMT but money creation/deficit spending.

Sandwichman does not get the point and his collection of dead arguments from the long history of economic blathering is at best good as a distraction from the original purpose of MMT, that is, to push overall profit.#4

Will Sandwichman ever understand the Employment Law?#5 This is what he fantasizes about his competence: “I have been on the full employment beat for over 20 years so I think I have a pretty good grasp of the terrain.” After 20 years in the deep woods there is no hope left for the man.

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke

#1 The Three Fatal Mistakes of Yesterday Economics: Profit, I=S, Employment
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2489792

#2 Keynes’ Employment Function and the Gratuitous Phillips Curve Disaster
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2130421

#3 Full employment through the price mechanism
https://axecorg.blogspot.de/2017/11/full-employment-through-price-mechanism.html

#4 Keynes, Lerner, MMT, Trump and exploding profit
https://axecorg.blogspot.de/2017/12/keynes-lerner-mmt-trump-and-exploding.html

#5 The set screws of overall and individual employment
https://axecorg.blogspot.de/2018/05/the-set-screws-of-overall-and.html

Ralph Musgrave said...

It's good to see Karaoke-Handcart making a fool of himself again. He says "According to the axiomatically correct Profit Law it always holds Public Deficit = Private Profit. Therefore, MMT is a program for the one-percenters and NOT for the ninety-nine-percenters...".

Er - what about if a deficit takes the form of handing out more to the unemployed or the elderly?

Ralph Musgrave said...

The entire "buffer stock" idea, which Bill Mitchell seems to think is some big insight of his, is irrelevant. My reasons are here:

http://ralphanomics.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/job-guarantee-buffer-stock-nonsense.html

Take any article on JG you like, and scrub the phrase "buffer stock" from it. You'll find it won't make any difference to the quality of the article or clarity of the ideas in the article.

Tom Hickey said...

Er - what about if a deficit takes the form of handing out more to the unemployed or the elderly?

That's where the flow begins. Where this flow ends in changes in stocks of savings aka portfolios is determinative of who wins in the end.

As Michael Hudson says, that either needs to be preempted or taxed away for distributed wealth and prosperity. Otherwise, rentierism prevails.

Tom Hickey said...

Take any article on JG you like, and scrub the phrase "buffer stock" from it. You'll find it won't make any difference to the quality of the article or clarity of the ideas in the article.

YOu'll just obscure the real issue, buffer stock of employed or buffer stock of unemployed as "reserve army of the destitute" that have no income in a socio-economic system in which income in needed to survive.

AXEC / E.K-H said...

Ralph Musgrave

You ask: “Er ― what about if a deficit takes the form of handing out more to the unemployed or the elderly?”

The macroeconomic Profit Law reads Qm=Yd+I−Sm+(G−T)+(X−M) for an open economy (X−M) with a government sector (G−T), and with business investment I, household sector saving/dissaving Sm, and distributed profit Yd.

It does NOT MATTER AT ALL whether the budget deficit (G−T) is created by handing out more money to the military, the unemployed, the elderly, or for Stephanie Kelton’s program A Pony for Every American.

A budget deficit means ALWAYS a monetary profit of equal amount for the business sector and imperceptible taxation in real terms for the household sector. The social goodies MMT promises are in any case paid for in real terms by the ninety-nine-percenters themselves.#2

Nothing has enriched the rich more in the last decades than public deficit spending and MMT’s political fraud consists in keeping the public debt growing by producing a social smokescreen.#3

Only morons, retarded economists like Ralph Musgrave, and Marxist philosophers like Tom Hickey do not see the correlation between the growth of financial wealth and the growth of public/private debt.

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke

#1 MMT, money printing, stealth taxation, and redistribution
http://axecorg.blogspot.de/2017/11/mmt-money-printing-stealth-taxation-and.html

#2 MMT is idiocy and fraud
http://axecorg.blogspot.de/2018/03/mmt-is-idiocy-and-fraud.html

#3 How MMT fools the ninety-nine-percenters
https://axecorg.blogspot.de/2018/03/how-mmt-fools-ninety-nine-percenters.html