Pavlina Tcherneva is chair of the department of economics at Bard College and a research scholar at Bard's Levy Economics Institute.

Though job growth surged in June, by and large, this recovery has been the slowest in postwar history and 7.8 million people continue to look, unsuccessfully, for work.

There is nothing inevitable or natural about jobless recoveries.

If they have become a new normal, it is largely by design. Fiscal and monetary policies always arrive too late — when recessions are well underway — and just as it is impossible to stop an avalanche after it has started, it's impossible to reverse mass layoffs in the midst of a crisis.

There are better ways to stabilize the business cycle and prepare for the next recession through forward-thinking policies of prevention and mitigation.

For example, a voluntary federal jobs program for the unemployed could be established now to provide individuals and families with as-needed job assurance at a base (living) wage. Think of it as an employment safety-net: The program would be permanent but the jobs would be transitional. It would be federally funded but designed and administered by localities, non-profits or social enterprises. It would put the unemployed to work in much needed public service, green or care projects, and provide on-the-job training and education that would help people transition back into private sector employment.

A voluntary federal jobs program would serve as a safety-net: The program would be permanent but the jobs would be transitional.

This is a genuine preventative policy. It stops unemployment from mushrooming while maintaining tight full employment over the long run. Importantly, it slashes the large direct and indirect costs of unemployment that society and governments already bear, including high crime and incarceration rates, mental and physical health problems, elevated mortality rates, urban blight, and social and political turmoil. The current policy of tolerating any amount of involuntary unemployment, while paying for its social and economic consequences, is simply too expensive. A federal jobs program is much cheaper.

It is also an effective counter-cyclical stabilizer: Spending on the program would increase at the onset of recessions — when more people are unemployed and need it — and shrink as the private sector recovers and hires more workers.

Plus, Americans overwhelmingly support government job creation programs. A whopping 72 percent favor a federally funded infrastructure investment program to hire the unemployed, and the same number back a federal law that would create more than one million new jobs.

But if we want to be ready for the next recession, the time to implement the jobs program is now.



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