The unemployment crisis should not be a state issue

Doing unemployment well is oxymoronic. Joblessness, as Pope Francis put it some years ago in an address to workers in Sardinia, "wears you out to the depths of your soul." There are no good circumstances under which millions of Americans might find themselves deprived not only of their wages but even of their ability to pursue employment.

This does not excuse the horrifying reality of the present, where workers in state after state have found themselves waiting on benefits as agency websites crash and bureaucrats politely suggest that they consider waiting to apply until the servers have had a chance to rest. The basic pattern has been the same across the country. Both widely praised governors such as Democrats Andrew Cuomo of New York and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and those who have been reviled in the national media — mostly southern Republicans — alike struggled to keep their state unemployment agencies functioning. While it would be absurd to suggest that our governors deserve no blame for this, there is a real sense in which this was inevitable.

I don’t wish to compound my "Wuhan pneumonia"-related offenses against the dignity of a nation engaged in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against its own ethnic minorities by calling our unemployment system a "Chinese fire drill." Instead I will simply say that a system that asks each of the states to establish its own parameters for unemployment, taxing employers twice, putting this money into distinct pools, and then creating 50 different portals for accessing the funds with virtually no federal oversight is a recipe for failure.

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It is also something we ought to have fixed ages ago. Instead of the states collecting money, exhausting the funds, borrowing more from the federal government, and paying them back again (sometimes only with the help of private loans), we should have a centralized federal agency responsible for administering unemployment benefits. The unemployed should be able to claim these benefits with the click of a button, as easily as if they were checking their bank statements online.

But even if our unemployment system were rationalized overnight, the relief would only be temporary. Many of the jobs lost in the last month and a half of this pandemic will not be coming back. (This should not be the case with those companies in which American taxpayers are now shareholders, but it almost certainly will be.)

How can we avoid the misery of a prolonged depression with double-digit unemployment and declining wages even for those lucky enough to hold on to jobs? By guaranteeing employment for all Americans.

When I say we must guarantee employment I mean it quite literally. We must ensure that after we emerge from lockdown every single American has access to dignified work, work that is secure and well remunerated, work that provides those engaged in it with a sense of satisfaction and purpose. This means that it must be connected to some definite and laudable goal — feeding the hungry, clothing the sick, sheltering the homeless, bringing beauty and leisure to those who have been denied them. This will mean growing crops and manufacturing goods and building roads and bridges and railway lines and airports and parks and, no doubt, obelisks and 500-foot-tall statues of Emperor Donald I.

How will we go about this? The simplest way is to create a new ad-hoc federal agency, one that I will call (both for the sake of simplicity and because government bodies could do with less dreary sounding names) the Hope Commission. The Hope Commission would be an infrastructure project, the largest in American history. It would employ people directly, assigning them duties in accordance with their skill sets, and it would also educate them, partnering with state universities and community colleges to raise up a new generation of engineers, skilled tradesmen, artisans, technicians, designers, and so on. Businesses would find themselves forced to compete with the higher wages made available to commission employees, something not all of them would be willing to do. If we need a chain coffee shop on every corner, chain coffee shops will have to pay employees more. If they do not, chain coffee shops may just have to disappear.

While we’re at it, we could buy Greenland, probably at a bargain rate. We could even make it a new state. As long as we don’t put it in charge of unemployment, that is.

Editor's note: A previous version of this article misrepresented the funding mechanism for unemployment insurance. It has been corrected. We regret the error.

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