Just as inequality creates a need for stimulus, they argue, stimulus eventually creates more inequality.
Particularly when your predominant stimulus tool is 'print money to buy assets rich people have.'
Particularly when your predominant stimulus tool is 'print money to buy assets rich people have.'
From 1929, central bankers learnt that liquidity can be a terrifying disease in an economy, 2008 showed that printing helps and here they go with their newly learned tool trying to fix all problems. Now they have to figure out that if you only inject that liquidity from the top, the inflation appears in certain kind of assets (mostly financial) and has a hard time reaching the rest of the economy, causing ever-rising inequality.
I think a more refined approach will be developed at some point, where they will start using two levers to steer the function of the economy. Money printing from below via UBI and regulating the inflation of day-to-day assets and money-printing from above and regulating the inflation of financial assets. This could allow finer control balancing target inflation rates of different assets and preventing rising inequality to tear down society.
The government grants a job to anyone that wants to work at a minimum wage salary. When unemployment grow, the government automatically expend more in the economy because more people access to the job guarantee.
When the economy recovers the private sector take workers away from the job guarantee through paying a little more than the minimum wage (or the same and better conditions) and the government spending is reduced.
It's both an inflation and an unemployment stabilizer. UBI doesn't have those properties.
The guaranteed job need not be pleasant. Hell, many already aren't.
But a job would be guaranteed and would meet basic needs.
But the original question was how to provide incentive. Assuming able-bodied persons must provide some work, opportunities for advancement, more pay, or more favourable environment, and the prospect of less attractive work, remain. Military and similar environments provide models, e.g., latrine duty.
Most people would prefer some useful occupation, I suspect, however humble.
And again, with guaranteed employment, even the worst job would provide a livelihood.
There are different ideas, but, I suppose that you could see it like a training program too.
Also, there are some supposed psychological benefits to work. And there is always something to do at the local community level, so it would not be totally unproductive work.
Also I don't think it's necessary that a job guarantee make an employee immune from being fired. I'd imagine a job guarantee would have all kinds of jobs ranging from relatively simple (eg. cleaning) to more complex (eg. science). If you're in a more demanding department and underperforming, you could get fired and have to apply to another job in another department.
For example, the military is sort of like a job guarantee in the sense that anyone meeting the physical bar is effectively hired. But any military member can get discharged.
Remember that 40% of americans can't afford a $400 emergency.
Also, it's not only, even not mainly, a social program, but an automatic stabilizer in the economy.
It gives power to the workers too, because there is always an, even if with low pay, alternative available.
I don't think there is a great track record of jobs being run by the government (or farmed out by the government to other organizations) as being idyllic workplaces.
Also a bs job is soul crushing and work-ethic destroying.
The only true power comes from being able to walk away from the control of anyone else, being able to simply say "no". For that, one needs a UBI.
I don't know much about the USSR, but I don't think they set everyone's salaries the same or distributed money equally, or any other nonsense like that.
If this central authority is even necessary is an entirely different discussion. My current view is that the economy viewed as a dynamical system is subject to strong positive-feedback loops and these are known to cause ugly behaviors in the solutions of a system (the equivalent of boom and busts in economics). Introducing forces contrary to those positive-feedback loops to stabilize the economy may make sense theoretically. The jury is out if central bankers can do this, know how to do it or if the political incentives are there to even make it happen.
But they’d have more money, presumably more than what they paid for the assets. Not that money and goods are exactly fungible, but buying assets from the wealthy makes them wealthier, not poorer or status quo.