My feelings about the prospect of a jobs guarantee certainly aren’t unilaterally positive, especially if you’re comparing it to other provision-of-welfare schemes that can be imagined.  But there’s one argument in its favor that, for whatever reason, I haven’t much been hearing –

This is a plausible way to fund a lot of public work that we should be funding anyway, but aren’t, because our political system is borked.

There’s a lot of stuff in that category.  Our transit infrastructure is shitty and behind-the-times and poorly-maintained, and there are a lot of complex reasons for that, but much of it boils down to “the people in charge of making our transit infrastructure good can’t get the money to do so.”  We could usefully build enormous amounts of housing, but at the moment there’s no one who wants to pay for that.  The justice system is hideously slow and backlogged because we don’t have enough people to man it at any level, which includes high-education roles like “judge” and “public lawyer” but also includes normal-working-person roles like “forensic lab assistant”.  Something something more elder care workers. 

I realize that a lot of conservatives and libertarian-types are going to snort at the idea that our government doesn’t get its hands on enough money.  But…our government isn’t a unified entity either horizontally or vertically, and whatever your priorities actually are, it’s easy to conclude that important things get starved while stupid useless things bloat. 

There’s at least a reasonable possibility that, if we suddenly have this giant pool of people whom we need to be giving jobs anyway, we will have our shit together at least enough to have them do the things that we need doing. 

…I kind of suspect that the failure to articulate this idea underlies some of the conflict regarding the question of “how terrible are government-guaranteed-jobs going to be?”  If you’re imagining the average such job as, like, “construction worker fixing train lines” or “nursing home flunky,” you’re probably a lot more sanguine than if you’re imagining someone digging ditches and then filling them back in.