The most detailed version of the jobs guarantee aims to draw all those people back in. It’s been developed over the years by a group of unorthodox economists who call their school of thought Modern Monetary Theory, and argue that there’s more room for deficit spending than is widely believed.

Their plan, a blueprint for a proposal that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is crafting, would offer work nationwide at $15 an hour, more than double the federal minimum wage. Funding would come from the federal government, but jobs would be assigned locally. There’d be a part-time option, and benefits including health care.

The net cost would be between $200 billion and $400 billion a year, the authors estimate. That’s roughly in the ballpark of federal spending on Medicaid, and would expand an already-widening budget deficit by as much as 2 percent of GDP.

The fiscal hit is just one reason many economists find the plan implausible. Brian Riedl of the conservative Manhattan Institute dismisses a jobs guarantee as “fantasy-land economics.” He said it would require higher taxes, and devastate industries like retail and fast food which pay below the proposed rate.

There are practical questions -- how to find useful work for millions of workers -- and philosophical ones about the government’s role in the economy.

‘Usurping the Market’

“It’s the sort of thing that sounds good on the surface, but the more they dig into it, they say how’s this going to work?” said Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Amherst Pierpont Securities and a former Federal Reserve researcher. “It’s usurping the market.”

Stanley notes that the last time America attempted anything similar was during a real labor emergency: the Great Depression. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration hired millions of workers across the U.S., largely for construction jobs.

New Deal programs fell short of a full federal jobs guarantee, and so do some of the current proposals. Booker is introducing legislation to test the idea in 15 communities. That’s not how the most important safety-net programs such as Social Security and Medicaid were born, points out Stephanie Kelton, a leading MMT economist. She was an adviser to Sanders in 2016, and has been working with him recently on a national jobs guarantee proposal.

‘Jobs, jobs, jobs’