The cause célèbre on the left is something called the jobs-guarantee plan, put forward by think tanks and embraced by likely 2020 Democratic presidential candidates including Sens. Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand and Bernie Sanders.

According to the Washington Post, Sanders backs a version where local and state governments would offer proposals for public works projects, and, after they are vetted, workers would be hired for at least $15 a hour with paid family and medical leave.

The practical questions abound, from how much such a plan would cost, to what kind of useful jobs can be created when it’s unclear whether there will be labor to fill it, to the impact on companies that currently employ low-income workers.

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An ambitious proposal from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities used as a point of reference a creation of 9.7 million full-time jobs at a cost of $543 billion, providing a sense of the scale being discussed.

Regardless of the practicalities, the discussion belies an uncomfortable truth: There’s a major Washington institution that, as part of its congressional mandate, is supposed to guarantee that not everyone has a job.

That institution is the Federal Reserve.

It’s not, to be fair, an accusation that can be credibly thrown at the Fed of late. During the recession, the Fed slashed target interest rates to nearly zero and bought trillions of dollars in bonds. It had an impressive impact on job creation, particularly considering that, until this year, Congress had been unwilling to help — the unemployment rate has dropped from a peak of 10% to just over 4% now. The available labor supply (the number of unemployed people plus the number of people out of the labor force who want a job) has gone from 21.3 million to 11.7 million.

The Fed’s been unwinding that stimulus, but slowly. Even as the 10-year yield TMUBMUSD10Y, 0.683% reaches 3%, the Fed’s interest rates are still at a level that nearly every policy maker at the institution considers to be accommodative.

Still, the Fed is actively considering a return to its job-killing past. Eschewing the language of Jack the Ripper, the minutes of the last Federal Open Market Committee meeting read: “Some participants suggested that, at some point, it might become necessary to revise statement language to acknowledge that, in pursuit of the Committee’s statutory mandate and consistent with the median of participants’ policy rate projections in the [Summary of Economic Projections], monetary policy eventually would likely gradually move from an accommodative stance to being a neutral or restraining factor for economic activity.”

Read those last five words again. A “restraining factor for economic activity.”

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The Fed in fact has an open discussion about just how many jobs it wants to kill. In time — although the Fed says it’s not in a hurry — the central bank expects the jobless rate to be around 4.5%, up from March’s level of 4.1%.

Given today’s population, that’s roughly 650,000 more people the Fed wants to see unemployed, in the name of maintaining inflation of around 2%. If the Fed’s right that unemployment will drop to 3.6% next year, that’s roughly 1.5 million more people out of work with a jobless rate moving nine-tenths of a percentage point higher.

To be clear, this is the Fed’s congressional mandate, not some maniacal plot of Jerome Powell and crew.

But at a time when the government is considering adding work requirements to safety-net programs including Medicare and food stamps, it at least seems reasonable to consider a counterweight to the government institution making getting a job more difficult.

In fact, considering the program in the context of the Fed’s job-killing efforts might result in a more manageable, and achievable, policy. Simply scaling the CBPP program down to 1 million jobs, given its own estimates, would result in a cost of $56 billion per year, not small but not unaffordable in the context of trillion-dollar annual federal deficits.

Put more bluntly, it’s worth at least thinking about what Bernie Sanders would do to mitigate the impact of Jerome Powell.