Current jobs situation

[William Meyer]

Did you catch the jobs report this morning?  Awful just awful.  Especially after last months jumbo annual revision downward.  

Looks like the only sector doing well is healthcare.  But its more complicated when you look at the details.  3 major types of healthcare jobs: hospital, clinic and patient home care with competitiveness of compensation in that order.  Guess which one added the most jobs? Home healthcare.  The least?  Hospitals.

What is the proper keynesian/mmt response when blowout deficits are producing such meager job gains?

[Joe Leote]

I don't recall specifically what various MMT proponents have said about how government policy should remedy stagflation. Abba Lerner promoted functional finance and Michael Kalecki used similar concepts to describe political aspects of full employment:

Lerner Functional Finance.pdf

Political Aspects of Full Employment

Post-Keynesian Economist Hyman Minsky argued the analogy that there are 57 Varieties of capitalism including the Big Government and Big Central Bank version emerging after World War II. In theory Big Government (federal policy) could use its tax and spend policies with automatic stabilizers to promote full employment and moderate inflation. Minsky might have contemplated a federal job guarantee as part of federal policy. MMT proponents argue that a federal job guarantee would put a price floor under wages to help stabilize prices against wage deflation but I don't know what tax and spend policies address stagflation. MMT economist L. Randall Wray was a student of Hyman Minsky:

Functional Finance: A Comparison of the Evolution of the Positions of Hyman Minsky and Abba Lerner

Post-Keynesian economics does the best job of describing theories that fit the modern complex political-economy but there are disputes within the school over proper policy solutions to macroeconomic problems of high unemployment, rampant inflation, or deflation in addition to persistent financial imbalances caused by international trade patterns. I think the existing global order has used central banks and/or international capital mobility to take pressure off the currency adjustments that would result from persistent trade imbalances. But then it becomes a problem of international cooperation at the Sovereign government and central bank level rather than having currency market dealers inside banks and speculative markets force adjustments in international trade patterns.

Joe

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