Let me emphasize that I'm not arguing for the current welfare system. I'm arguing that replacing it with a Basic Job is superior to both the current system and a Basic Income.

Much like a Basic Income, a Basic Job also gives you an incentive to work. No work => no pay. People will accept a $10/hour house cleaning job because it's better than a $7.25/hour Basic Job. In contrast, with a Basic Income, the choice is $7.25/hour equivalent for watching TV, or maybe twice that for working hard. Many people will be happy to live without working.

Additionally, society gains the benefit of the public works created by people working the Basic Job. We gain cleaner parks, better infrastructure, etc. (Unless you want to claim that US infrastructure is as good as it could possibly be...)

This seems to me like a disguised return of slave work.

In my value system, forcing people to do unfulfilling work to be able to feed themselves is nowhere near a positive.

Paying people to stay at home is not ideal, but it's the least terrible, just like democracy is the least terrible form of government we've experienced yet. And, with an education system that works, it contributes to solving the problem over generations.

Plus, I don't see what the problem is with people not working, as long as society can support it. I'd rather support poor unemployed people than nearly anything else governments spend their cash on these days.

You either don't know what slavery is, or you didn't read what I wrote. No one is owned by anyone else. No one is forced to work.

I'd rather support poor unemployed people and get new public works than simply support poor unemployed people.

It may not be slavery but it sounds rather like a reinvention of the workhouse.

Basic Job isn't a terrible idea mind you, it's just much more complex and fragile.

It would require a lot of political will to constantly prune jobs that do more harm than good, jobs that are degrading and meaningless (think of painting park grass with green paint), have enough jobs so everyone technically have one, and

USSR had this Basic Job thing, everybody had a job but nothing got done because you couldn't get fired from one and not get an equal one. So best-performing workers adopted habits of worse-performing ones. Who watches the workers? Does she earn the same $7.25?

Another problem is corruption. Easier and prettier Basic Jobs would be lucrative, everybody wanting to have them, and you will have bribes and kickbacks for landing on one. If unwilling to participate in corruption, you will only have a choice of worst ones.

Everything can be fixed but it's very hard in total.

It's worth reinforcing the point that a guaranteed job requires effectively zero economic output in order to receive a paycheck. If you are guaranteed a job, and we accept that people seek to maximize their income per unit of work done, then the maximization of that function is to do as little work as possible without losing the job. If you are guaranteed a job, then it effectively means that you can't be economically penalized for doing no work, so the most efficient personal approach is to just collect your paycheck and do no work.

The threat of economic penalty for failing to work is an important incentive to actually contribute to economic output.

I'm not sure why a basic job would be any better than a basic income since it would encourage people to collect income for no work performed, except that it would do so at risk and expense to the employer (and at damage to the employer's brand and reputation) rather than at expense to the tax paying populace as a whole.

I don't understand this. Why can't you be guaranteed a job, but you don't get paid if you don't do it? I don't see how paying people who refuse to work is a necessary part of a Basic Job Guarantee.

Also, the purpose of this is for the unemployed to clean up and improve public parks, repair potholes and the like. Private employers are under no obligation to hire anyone.

A lot of unemployed are mentally ill, psychologically unstable or disabled people. How much oversight will you need to get any meaningful output from them? Yeah, they come and try to be useful, but they don't accomplish anything, you fire them, they either go to court or apply to another job they can't do.

BIG solves this but Basic Job doesn't in the slightest.

The mentally ill and disabled are simply a different problem. Handing $1200/month in free money to a schizophrenic is not a solution either.

The whole idea is to decrease a number of "different problems" as much as possible. I don't know if it would help schizophrenics, but why not? At least it can get one off street by providing means to pay rent (which can be administred by his/her legal guardian).

An unmotivated, largely unsupervised park fence painter might not achieve much in the way of output for their $7.25 per hour, but importantly they aren't being paid $7.25 per hour to enjoy their chosen form of leisure. Which means that when someone in the private sector wants to pay them $8.50 per hour to work hard creating $10 per hour worth of value, they might actually consider saying yes. Any value the "basic jobs" themselves add to society is just a bonus.

I don't see why the administration of "Basic Jobs" would be any more open to corruption than any other bureaucratic role, many of which administer things far more significant than next week's work assignment to people earning far more than $7.25 per hour. It doesn't seem unsurpassably difficult to design a set of rules to ensure that "basic jobs" are rotated and not too cushy or unpleasant; I'd actually see that as an easier task than calculating a level of "basic income" that doesn't grotesquely distort one or more of (i)low-end labour supply (ii)budget balance (iii)price inflation and (iv)rental yields on substandard property

There are two kinds of people: those who escape work or are incapable for it, and those who work fairly (but may still be poor). Former are going to build a lot of bad fences, for $7.25, but business only want latter ones. And if you have Basic Jobs, they would indeed be working for $8.50 in poverty, but if you have Basic Income, those would be working for an equivalent of $7.25 from BI and everything their fence-needing employer can conjure on top of that, which will hopefully give them something around $15/hour, which might let them get out of poverty actually.

Low-end labour supply is poor people. Low-end labour supply is people you pay not enough money for them to escape poverty.

Any effective fight with poverty would involve disrupting the "low-end labour supply" as we know it today.

The infrastructure around ensuring the Basic Jobs were available is not trivial. Finding tasks to do, providing transport, checking that job-takers were actually doing the requirements, managing staff (including things like providing uniforms) - these things are not small items on a grand scale. Basically you're talking about creating a new tier of low-paid public servants.