A jobs guarantee won't help all, but the answer is not "universal".
The answer is welfare reform, unsayable since the attack on welfare in the early 1990s.
Not everyone, but a lot of people say "minimum income" and mean, essentially, more adequate welfare. The difference../2. https://twitter.com/duncancameron/status/1252886622997266432

Some differences in welfare reform vs minimum income:
1. Administrative mechanism: Minimum income, through tax system, is more efficient, less invasive, but a) still prone to eligibility rules and b) may not be sufficiently timely for welfare needs, emergency need for income./3

1 (a) You can't avoid eligibility thresholds for minimum income.
Who gets how much when you are of working age, even if you can't work, is the issue.
Asset considerations remain (could you have $500K in an RRSP and ask for welfare cuz you can't find work?) /4

1 (b) Eligibility thresholds also can't avoid the question of how much you can earn on top of the minimum income. At what earnings will people who provide the min income (mostly workers) say you need to pay some of it back. At what point do we say this person needs no support? /5

1 (c) You can see eligibility thresholds re assets and earnings are really tricky, and prone to changing, just like welfare, based on political mood.
Covid19 makes it seem we're all in this together, but post Covid we'll be increasingly reliance on working age ppl due to ..../6

2. Increasing reliance on working age population: Population aging was a reality pre Covid19, with labour and skills shortages already widespread in some industries and regions.
Minimum income allows people some choice in how much to engage in paid labour market. .../7

2(a) How a minimum income/welfare (evenEI) interacts with labour force participation has always been the issue.
Now this tension is torqued up, because we've got the smallest working age cohort since the early 1960s supporting those too young, too old, too sick to work, BUT.../8

This time the dependency ratio (working age adults per non-working age population) is going to be a reality for decades, not years, and with a background rate of economic growth of half what was the case in the early 1960s. SO.../9

3 It's really important to build social solidarity, not increase tensions, between people who can and can't work.
Plus, the growing share of the population on low and fixed incomes will not love wage increases if it triggers inflation.
Solt'n: more and better public services./10

3(a) Anybody with any exposure to how welfare works for the past 1/4 century knows the critical role of non-income supports (dental, vision, drug, some transit, some child care, some training). And that moving off welfare means loss of those supports.
Part of "welfare wall". /11

3 (b) Not only was some of the animosity around those receiving welfare to"stay home" geared towards giving them money in the "tax cuts and welfare cuts" early 1990, but anger that they barely made more than what people on welfare received but didn't get drugs, dental,etc /12