We believe that the American people have been misled about the fundamental cause of unemployment in our economy. We are often told that unemployment is above all the result of a lack of personal responsibility on the part of the unemployed. The truth is that unemployment in America is structurally engineered, and persists due to the flawed character of the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate. The Fed’s “dual mandate” derives from the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1978 in which Congress mandated that the aim of the Fed would be to balance price stability and maximum employment. While earlier drafts of the bill included a job guarantee provision to deliver full employment, this was ultimately dropped from the final bill on the grounds of the now discredited notion that full employment is fundamentally incompatible with price stability. In its place was left a monetary policy regime that empowers the Fed to engineer elevated levels of unemployment in the name of fighting inflation, while leaving millions of Americans unemployed even when unemployment is historically low.

Today, over forty-five years later, we have seen the dire consequences of the path we chose in lieu of true full employment legislation, from the collapse of the middle class, to mass incarceration, to decades of stagnant wages, and heightened racial tension due to a scarcity of employment opportunities. These are the true costs of our current mass unemployment regime, and they dwarf the relatively modest costs of guaranteeing full employment. We believe that many of our nation’s most damaging social and economic issues are rooted in the way our government actively enforces mass unemployment, and it is not until we close the “employment gap” that we will be able to truly fix what is broken in America. By passing legislation that would eliminate involuntary unemployment, we would liberate ourselves from the economic insecurity that too many have grown accustomed to. While any number of public policy proposals, or philanthropic initiatives may be beneficial to the public in some way, we maintain that if they do not close the employment gap, they ultimately result in the perpetuation of a game of musical chairs with the livelihoods of American workers, wherein there are never enough jobs to go around.

The Job Guarantee enjoys remarkably broad support already, polling at 78% according to the most recent available data. Dozens of members of Congress, as well as dozens of economists, and other academics have expressed support for the idea as well. While there remains much work to do to build the support necessary to pass legislation, including various interim measures, we are guided by the conviction that we now have the knowledge and the tools to abolish involuntary unemployment in America, and that we therefore must, so that the wounds of the past may begin to heal, and the promise of America may finally be enjoyed by all.