The American economy is headed for a recession. As many as three million people could be out of work by summertime, even with a modest stimulus, the Economic Policy Institute predicted on Thursday. A new poll finds that, already, nearly one in five workers in the United States has faced layoff or a loss of hours because of the coronavirus. Among workers making less than $50,000 a year, that figure jumps to one in four. Jobless claims in Colorado have increased seventeenfold since last Monday. Thanks to the coronavirus and the shutdowns needed to fight it, people across professions now face months of lost wages: bartenders, musicians, bouncers, baristas, blackjack dealers, home health aides, waitstaff, retail workers, and flight attendants, to name just a few. Teachers working in public schools, whose funding depends on local tax bases, will also face harsh cutbacks as unemployment skyrockets. A recovery package could simply—and probably unsuccessfully—try to get the economy back up to where it was before the Covid-19 shutdowns took hold, complete with its decades of wage stagnation, exploding carbon emissions, and staggering inequality. Or, with politicians newly willing to spend, it could build a carbon-neutral, significantly stronger and fairer society—and put millions to work doing it.



In recent days, politicians have floated several commonsense short-term solutions—many of them originating with various social movements: paid leave; direct cash payments of $1,000 or more to American adults, possibly every month while the outbreak lasts; a moratorium on rent and utility payments—or at the very least on evictions and shutoffs. But as what may prove to be a deep and painful recession lasting far beyond the coronavirus sets in, more than quick cash and temporary relief will be needed. A breaking wave of corporate bankruptcies—an event the Fed is now scrambling to contain—could leave hundreds of thousands more unemployed in its wake. Helpfully, the magnitude of the Covid-19 threat has broken open the idea that deficits are more important than meeting pressing public health and economic challenges. Even Mnuchin told reporters on Tuesday, “This is not the time to worry about” the deficit, floating a stimulus that could add up to more than $1 trillion—a size Obama’s top economic adviser, Larry Summers, balked at a decade ago.

As the hardly radical New York Times editorial board wrote yesterday, even right now, while many of us are effectively housebound, the government could put to work those rendered wageless or unemployed by the coronavirus shutdowns, in a wartime-style mobilization to blunt its impact:

The government could train America’s newly unemployed to sanitize hospital equipment or to deliver food to the elderly and the immune-compromised. Child care for hospital workers on the front lines is desperately needed. Through a new public works program, corps of people could implement infection control in nursing homes and other high-risk facilities—or teach workers of all kinds how best to protect themselves. There could even be a network of individuals tasked with making phone calls to combat loneliness for people in nursing homes and prisons while they’re unable to receive visitors.

Before the immediate mobilization around World War II, the years leading up to it saw federal jobs programs employ millions in work the private sector simply didn’t see as important enough to create. The Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration paid some 12.5 million people to do everything from planting trees to building bridges to writing plays. Full employment was an animating demand of social movements through much of the postwar era, which led to it being featured in the Democratic Party platform until 1980.

In more recent years, progressive economists and a number of current and former Democratic presidential candidates have backed the idea of a federal job guarantee consistent with a Green New Deal: The U.S. government would permanently become the country’s employer of last resort through a program that’s always in place but kicks into high gear during an economic downturn and then shrinks when people find work elsewhere in the public or private sector. One possible benefit to such a program is that it could provide an alternative to low-paid work bound up in carbon-intensive supply chains like those at McDonald’s and Walmart—currently the only employment on offer in many communities around the country. It could put people to work doing tasks the country urgently needs—including those that actively fight climate change and its impacts, instead of simply spewing carbon into the atmosphere. It’d be popular, too: 70 percent of voters support the idea of a federal job guarantee.

