Guaranteed Employment and Universal Child Care For a New Social Contract

Jon Wisman and Aaron Pacitti

No 2017-05, Working Papers from American University, Department of Economics

Abstract: The United States is falling behind many other rich nations on a broad spectrum of measures of the quality of life. These include social mobility, inequality, education, crime, health and longevity. Polls suggest that many Americans have not only lost their optimism concerning the future, but have become angry as well. This article sets forth the elements of a new social contract, one that would deliver substantial results almost overnight and which conforms to the traditional American values of the importance of work, that everyone should have a fair opportunity for upwards mobility, and the central importance of the family. This proposal is composed of two parts: The first is guaranteed employment, and where necessary, the retraining required to enable workers to successfully enter the regular workforce. The second is universal child care to give all parents the possibility of participating in the labor force. The article discusses in depth how these measures would reverse the relative decline in quality of life in America. It also reveals how, although these measure would be costly, their payoff for the economy would far offset the costs.

Keywords: Guaranteed employment; retraining; social costs of unemployment; child care (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 H10 I24 J83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-lab and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.17606/aq84-cj68 First version, 2017 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:amu:wpaper:2017-05

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from American University, Department of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thomas Meal ().