Sanders Wants Nearly $6 Billion in Taxpayer Dollars to Employ Young People

Sanders’s Employment Investments Lack a Grasp of Economics

by Josh Guckert

On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that Vermont Senator and 2016 Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders is sponsoring a bill, entitled the Employ Young Americans Now Act, which would invest $5.5 billion in the employment of 16-24 year-olds and job training grants.

Regarding his rationale for this program, Sanders stated that, “[W]e spend nearly $200 billion on public safety, including $70 billion on correctional facilities each and every year. . . [I]t makes a lot more sense to invest in jobs, in job training, and in education than spending incredible amounts of money on jails and law enforcement.”

While Sanders’s point is valid that the US spends an unnecessarily exorbitant amount of wealth and resources on law enforcement, this does not at all justify the use of more resources on other programs. It would appear that rather than reining in “law and order” conservatives’ excessive spending, Sanders is issuing a challenge to find who can spend more on frivolous projects.

Investments in employment are one of the oldest tactics in the liberal election handbook. Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s New Deal era produced some of the most (in)famous examples.

RELATED: Why Bernie Sanders is Wrong About Everything

“Public works” fail in that they are unlike any private sector work programs. They are not responsive to the effects of supply and demand and are certainly not pressed to become innovative so that their industry may survive. While workers and industrialists in capitalism must always adapt and change to remain afloat, government workers are often tasked with performance in the most tedious ways possible just for the sake of “creating jobs.”

One of the greatest anecdotes to this effect is from Milton Friedman. While several different variants of the story have been told, the tale has it that Friedman once visited a work area where a new canal was being built. He noticed that instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers were using shovels. He asked why there were so few machines, to which the government bureaucrat on hand explained, “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” Friedman replied, “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”

RELATED: Bernie Sanders Pushes More Stupid Socialism During Reddit AMA

Just like we have learned with education, military and nearly every other industry, money cannot simply be thrown at areas of the economy in order to make them grow in an efficient manner. Accordingly, “bigger” (in the form of more raw dollars) is not always better.

Sanders’s arguments suffer from a larger liberal fallacy of suggesting that areas that are “important” deserve more government meddling. To the contrary, perhaps that which we cherish the most should receive the most deference from government, exemplified through a lack of bureaucratic intervention.

As in most other industries, education and training is best left to the market. In fact, one of the best ways in which we could allow younger workers the ability to have training and make themselves more marketable is to bring an end to the hurdles which prevent employers from hiring young, minority and non-skilled workers, including the minimum wage (which Senator Sanders has advocated raising to at least $15/hr).

RELATED: Top 5 Dumbest Quotes From Bernie Sanders

In short, while Sanders’s ambitions may be benevolent, his methods are questionable at best. The creation of new federal job programs will do nothing but take capital out of the “productive” area of the economy (by taxing the private sector) in order to fund the “un-productive” area of the economy (the public sector). This is even without accounting for the additional dollars unnecessarily lost in the bureaucracy in between these two areas; alternatively, if the free market were to engage in a similar transaction, it would be a simple fee-for-service trade.

It would appear that in Bernie Sanders’s world, taking two $10 bills out of your right pocket, burning one and then placing the other in your left pocket equates to a profit.

RELATED: Bernie Sanders Says US Should Be More Like Scandinavia, Here’s Why He’s Wrong