/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>2499697
>Why can’t we do something like this again, wouldn’t a federal jobs program were people do stuff like planting trees, picking up litter, providing disaster relief, or doing food drives help decrease unemployment?
Unemployment is on purpose. They don't want 0 unemployment. They want a reserve army of labor, which means a certain variable amount of unemployment has to be maintained at all times for the "stability" of capitalism.

If there is 0 unemployment, then that means it's harder to replace people when you fire them, or to pick up scabs when people try to unionize. They don't like that. They like a large pool of desperate unemployed people willing to underbid existing employed people for lower wages.

Here's someone admitting it. [Vid]

Real estate CEO Tim Gurner openly advocated for a reserve army of labour during an onstage appearance at the Australian Financial Review’s Property Summit:

>I think the problem that we’ve had is that people have decided they really didn’t want to work so much anymore through COVID, and that has had a massive issue on productivity. . . . They have been paid a lot to do not too much, and we need to see that change. We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment needs to jump 40-50 percent, in my view. We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. There’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them, as opposed to the other way around. So it’s a dynamic that has to change. We’ve got to kill that attitude, and that has to come through hurt in the economy.

But also consider that the US/UK literally opposed international legislation that would have pushed Keynesian ideas of full employment:

>Originally GATT was set up as a temporary body to facilitate trade negotiations. The International Trade Organisation (ITO) had instead been created to break down trade barriers, govern trade during negotiations, and resolve trade disputes. The ITO Charter, adopted at the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTE) in 1948, included (among other "leftist" principles) a provision that all nations should maintain full employment. This provision outraged the U.S. and U.K.; both calling it socialistic and a violation of national sovereignty. In 1950, the U.S. government refused to ratify the agreement, and the ITO died

Here, we can see a blatant instance of the international bourgeoisie colluding to frame the full employment of the proletariat of all nations as somehow being harmful to society (specifically the bourgeois ideal of national sovereignty).

Source: https://www.marxists.org/glossary/orgs/g/e.htm

>>713052
>Why can’t we do something like this again, wouldn’t a federal jobs program were people do stuff like planting trees, picking up litter, providing disaster relief, or doing food drives help decrease unemployment?
Yes. Increased government spending increases inflation and reduces unemployment, and those two things are related by an inverse relationship called the Phillip's curve. Different governments may choose different tradeoffs between inflation and unemployment depending on circumstances and their ideology. During the great depression, the USA had really bad deflation (negative inflation) and extremely high unemployment, so there was overwhelming political will for things like jobs programs that could solve those problems.

Between the start of the neoliberal era and the pandemic, the US government and federal reserve pursued a policy called "The Washington Consensus", which prioritized low inflation at the cost of higher unemployment. Economists now believe that this policy was partially responsible for the lower economic growth and growing inequality that characterized this period, and as a result, the pendulum swung after the 2020 recession and, with a democrat in the white house, interest and lobbying groups such as Employ America pushed for a policy of higher spending in response to the recession. This led to the period between 2021 and 2023, which saw the lowest unemployment rates in the US since 1953. You might remember what this looked like from the inside. A big meme at the time was "no one wants to work anymore", as employers were having trouble finding workers to work at lower wages. This naturally led to higher inflation, which policymakers assumed would either/both be more negligible than what actually happened (partially because of cost-push inflation in some sectors like agriculture caused by an avian flu outbreak) and/or that voters would tolerate it in exchange for a swift end to the recession, in comparison to the years of unemployment and sluggish growth the USA saw in the years after the global financial crisis.

However, voters rebelled hard against inflation, and before Biden was out of the white house US fiscal policy had already shifted to higher interest rates and higher unemployment.

So the answer for why the US government doesn't do another federal jobs program is that inflation makes you lose elections and we're not in a great depression right now.