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Tariffs Won't Help US Workers. A Job Guarantee Would.
As we confront what some are expecting to be the third once-in-a-generation economic downturn in less than two decades, we need to be ready with real solutions.
Apr 30, 2025
President Trump has given many contradictory reasons for his recent tariff spree, including claiming tariffs will “create jobs like we have never seen before.”
Yet research shows that tariffs don’t increase employment and instead are likely to cost jobs due to increased input prices and retaliatory tariffs. Economist Michael Strain at the conservative American Enterprise Institute expects Trump’s tariffs will lead to "recessionary levels" of unemployment. Ironically, analysts expect the rural and Heartland communities that voted for Trump will be disproportionately negatively impacted by retaliatory tariffs. Given how this Administration has cavalierly forced tens of thousands of federal workers out of good jobs and destroyed just as many research and nonprofit jobs supported by federal grants, it’s clear that employing Americans has never been the true priority.
A federal job guarantee is a public option for a good job—with living wages, full benefits, and union protections—on projects that meet community needs for physical and human infrastructure that are often long-overlooked.
But it should be a national priority. And we have a much better solution than tariffs: a job guarantee.
A federal job guarantee is a public option for a good job—with living wages, full benefits, and union protections—on projects that meet community needs for physical and human infrastructure that are often long-overlooked. Repairing bridges, helping communities recover from disasters, providing quality care for children and the elderly, fixing potholes, and expanding tree canopy to mitigate extreme heat are just a few examples of the community-building work that would become possible with a job guarantee.
A job guarantee would address the failure of our economy to provide good jobs for all. Even during times of relatively low unemployment, millions of Americans—currently 7.9 million—want full-time work but cannot find it. This is a chronic crisis that disproportionately burdens rural communities and communities of color. Another 39 million American workers are stuck in jobs that pay below $17 per hour, often with precarious, unhealthy, and undignified working conditions. Guaranteed jobs would provide these workers with the option of stable employment and real economic security.
Tariffs may grab headlines, but they don’t build communities or deliver good jobs.
A job guarantee is not a new idea. The right to a “useful and remunerative” job was the number one item on the Economic Bill of Rights proposed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944. Guaranteed jobs were a central demand of the civil rights movement, from the 1963 March on Washington to Coretta Scott King’s advocacy throughout the 1970s. And it nearly became law: the original Humphrey Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1978 included a legally enforceable right to a job with the federal government acting as employer of last resort, though that provision was stripped from the watered-down version that eventually passed. In recent years, congressional leaders including senators Cory Booker and Bernie Sanders have supported versions of a job guarantee, and representative Ayanna Pressley introduced a Congressional resolution outlining a modernized federal job guarantee that would pay $25 per hour.
While we’ve never had a true federal job guarantee, successful public employment efforts demonstrate its practicality and potential. In the 1930’s, the Works Progress Administration employed 8.5 million people building physical infrastructure and artistic works that strengthened our economy and culture for decades. Smaller-scale “subsidized employment” programs that provide the on-the-job training and wraparound supports for workers facing barriers to employment (similar to what would be provided by a job guarantee) also have a strong track record of success.
A job guarantee is not a new idea. The right to a “useful and remunerative” job was the number one item on the Economic Bill of Rights proposed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944.
By producing not only good jobs but also vital infrastructure and services, a job guarantee bolsters families and the neighborhoods where they live. Moreover, it would generate “trickle-up” economic effects. Money would begin circulating in persistently-disinvested communities, creating opportunities for grocery stores, small businesses, and local entrepreneurship. And a public option for good jobs would put healthy pressure on private employers to better compensate their workers—elevating wages and benefits across the board.
Funded by the federal government and implemented locally, a job guarantee would create new opportunities for civic engagement, with communities suggesting new public investments that meet their needs and manifest their aspirations. This partnership could strengthen democracy and rebuild trust that government can work for working people.
Ultimately, a job guarantee would create a more stable, resilient, and equitable economy. By immediately providing jobs and income at the first sign of an economic downturn, it would act as an automatic stabilizer—maintaining consumer spending and preventing prolonged recessions and jobless recoveries. This would benefit the economy as a whole and protect marginalized Black workers who are the “last hired and first fired” when the economy sours. It would enable a “just transition” away from unsustainable industries and address the threat of job displacement posed by AI, creating new jobs protecting the environment and mitigating climate change.
And for those who would dismiss this as socialism, it’s worth emphasizing: the job guarantee simply ensures there is an available job. If the more “productive” private sector can offer something better, all the better—workers will have the freedom to choose.
As we confront what some are expecting to be the third once-in-a-generation economic downturn in less than two decades, we need to be ready with real solutions. Tariffs may grab headlines, but they don’t build communities or deliver good jobs. Instead, this administration’s chaotic policies are creating widespread economic uncertainty and strain. A federal job guarantee, by contrast, is a bold economic policy rooted in American history and grounded in the needs of workers who’ve been sidelined by our economic policies. If we want to empower workers and build a more resilient economy, we should start investing in real solutions—starting with a job guarantee.
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How to Cut the Billionaires Behind This Coup Down to Size
The political left in Germany has a plan and strategy for the Elon Musk's of this world and maybe we should be learn from it.
Feb 17, 2025
Americans these days don’t much like billionaires. Our ultra-rich, Americans overwhelmingly believe, aren’t paying enough in taxes. Polling earlier this month found that nearly three-quarters of the nation’s likeliest voters — 74 percent — feel billionaires are paying “too little’ at tax time.
Just how concerned about billion-dollar fortunes have Americans become? Nearly half of us overall, Harris polling found last summer, would like to see a limit on “wealth accumulation.” Among Gen Z’ers, that support for limits on billionaire fortunes runs all the way up to 65 percent.
“Billionaires,” some 58 percent of Americans agreed in that same Harris poll, “are becoming more like dictators.”
The share of Americans equating billionaires with dictators — given Elon Musk’s current dominant role in the new Trump White House — is most likely running even higher today.
The best way to counter our ongoing billionaire coup? We might want to look east for some answers. In the run-up to Germany’s February 23 parliamentary elections, that nation’s Left Party, Die Linke, has proposed a detailed five-step set of initiatives designed to cut the super rich down to democratic size.
“We believe,” the Die Linke co-chair Jan van Aken notes simply in his intro to his party’s new plan, “that there should not be any billionaires.”
But van Aken and Die Linke understand quite well that no government can suddenly snap its fingers and make billionaires disappear. The party has instead melded ideas from all around the world into a coherent and common-sense package.
The Die Linke plan’s step one: restoring a “wealth tax.” Germany has been without one since the nation’s top court nixed the wealth tax in effect back in 1995. The proposed new version would revolve around an annual levy starting at 1 percent on wealth over 1 million euros — the equivalent of about $1.03 million — and rising up to 12 percent on wealth concentrations above a billion euros.
On top of that would come a special one-time wealth tax, also on a graduated scale, that would only impact Germans sitting on fortunes worth more than 2 million euros. This levy’s top rate would hit 30 percent for awesomely affluent Germans in the proposal’s highest wealth bracket.
Germany’s super rich would also see, under the Die Linke plan, a higher inheritance tax on the wealth they leave behind. On the annual income side, top corporate executives and other high-earners would face a 75-percent tax rate on their take-homes over a million euros.
The fifth and final plank of the Die Linke plan: replacing the current 25-percent flat tax on capital gains — the income from the sale of financial and other assets — with a graduated sliding scale of rates.
The overall goal of the Die Linke tax plan: a halving of the wealth of Germany’s wealthiest over the next decade. Three other German parties on the left side of German politics are also backing tax hikes on the wealthy, but at levels not nearly as significant as Die Linke.
Elon Musk’s favorite German party, meanwhile, sees nothing wrong in boosting the fortunes of Germany’s most fortunate. The ultra-far-right Alternative for Germany party, the Musk-backed Alternative für Deutschland, is pledginghigher tax relief for capital gains and an end to Germany’s existing inheritance tax.
Current polling is making the former investment banker Friedrich Merz the favorite to become Germany’s next chancellor. His conservative Christian Democratic Union party favors lowering the corporate tax rate and is now polling support from near 30 percent of Germany’s voters. Polls have the anti-immigrant AfD at a bit over 20 percent.
Die Linke has been rising in the pre-election polling since the party unveiled its tax plan, and the party gained 11,000 new members in January. Analysts now see Die Linke likely to finish with about 6 percent of the overall vote tally, maybe enough to prevent Germany’s right-wingers from forming a new government. But the party’s bold tax plan, either way, has no shot at becoming the law of the land in Germany’s next legislative session.
Still, what seems no more than tax-the-rich pie-in-the-sky in one generation can become actual tax policy in the next. In 1917, for instance, a bold group of American progressives proposed a tax rate of 100 percent on annual income over $100,000, the equivalent of nearly $2.5 million in today’s dollars. A generation later, in 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress to place that same 100-percent tax rate on America’s most affluent.
Lawmakers didn’t buy FDR’s 100-percent top rate, but they did pass legislation that had America’s richest facing a 94-percent tax on their top-bracket income by 1944. That U.S. top tax rate would hover around 90 percent for the next two decades, years that would see the United States become the world’s first-ever mass-middle-class nation.
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'Do You Hear What I Hear?' When Will Democrats Listen?
With our latest holiday-themed comic, we seek not only to empower the voices of working people, but also to push the Democrats to do so as we work to rebuild the party in favor of taking back and democratically transforming America.
Dec 16, 2024
It gives us no pleasure in saying this, for we definitely wanted it to go differently, but the Democrats deserved to lose. We, however, did not. They ceased to be the party of the people—the party of working people—years ago and they hardly seemed bothered by what was happening. Apparently the Democratic leaders were not listening to what working people were saying. Or, if they were listening, they failed to hear what was being said.
Embracing neoliberalism, the party’s leaders and presidents cultivated the affections of their billionaire donors; rationalized the widening inequalities and intensifying concentration of wealth and power; joined in the assaults upon the democratic achievements of the Greatest Generation and the Long Age of Roosevelt; distanced themselves from the resistance expressed in the Wisconsin Rising of 2011 and the anger and hopes of Occupy Wall Street; failed the Fight for $15; and made nothing of the polling which showed that Americans wanted not just change—indeed, radical change—but also jobs at living wages, guaranteed healthcare, decent affordable housing for all, and free public higher education (all of which would have amounted to what the greatest of Democratic Presidents, Franklin Roosevelt, projected as an Economic Bill of Rights in 1944).
In fact, even as workers began to organize anew and started demanding better deals from their bosses, the Democrats failed to act seriously to bolster their initiatives. Then, truly proving they had not been listening, they ran a 2024 presidential campaign that avoided calling out the billionaire bosses whose billions are growing ever greater and made little of the voiced needs and wants of the working class.
Situating our new comic in the Holiday season, we seek not only to remind liberals, progressives, radicals, and socialists to listen to and empower the voices of working people, but also to push the Democrats to do so as they/we work to rebuild the party in favor of taking back and democratically transforming America.
We close this installment of our comic-strip series with a portrait of FDR, the Democratic President who—for all of his tragic faults and failings—not only listened to and actually heard working people, but also encouraged them to progressively push him further than he might otherwise have gone and determinedly engaged their labors and energies to dramatically transform the nation and radically enhance freedom, equality, and democracy.
In upcoming comics for Common Dreams we intend to recount that history in hopes of inspiring and propelling Democrats and working people alike to take action.
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