Green New Deal and Guaranteed Job, Leave, Vacation and Retirement

Guaranteed job, leave, vacation and retirement

Guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States"

Here we veer from the climate change portion of the document to goals that seem even more difficult to achieve. Would a family-sustaining wage mean different pay for people with different numbers of children? Would it require that both adults in a given household work? The living wage in Springfield, Illinois -- chosen randomly -- in MIT's Living Wage calculator is $11.41 per hour for one adult and $18.44 for two adults and two children. If one of the adults is working part-time, the baseline hourly wage rises to $26.39.

Things change when you factor in benefits. An interesting 2018 report from the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities with some back-of-the-envelope calculations on the cost for a federal jobs guarantee suggested the government could provide 9.7 million jobs to the under- or unemployed at a mean wage of $32,500 to account for different levels of experience, etc. Adding in taxes and benefits makes the annual cost of each job about $56,000. So the total cost to the government each year would be about $543 billion.

That's less than the nearly $674 billion the government spends on the Pentagon's budget. It is much less than the government spends on safety net programs Medicare and Social Security each year.