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Yet, despite his inescapable affiliation with the s-word – long considered a politically fatal liability – and his reported contempt for the masses' sensibilities, Sanders continues to draw enormous crowds, outpace Hillary Clinton in attracting small donations and generate great enthusiasm, even among groups conventional wisdom doggedly insists will refuse to embrace his candidacy. That these throngs – energized by Sanders' egalitarian economic advocacy, support for worker empowerment and hostility to what he calls "the billionaire class" – are not noticeably put off by the description of these qualities as socialist, as opposed to merely "progressive," raises the question: Why doesn't Sanders avail himself of this political latitude and run on a more socialistic policy program?

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Of the array of non-reformist reforms Sanders could adopt as key planks, the one that probably makes the most sense is a job guarantee, whose historical advocates have ranged from Thomas Paine to Martin Luther King. Under this program, the federal government would act as the "employer of last resort"; it could hire the unemployed for its own national projects, funnel money to states and municipalities or let communities design their own projects and apply for funding.

Guaranteeing public sector employment to anyone who wants to sign up would accomplish a lot of the goals Sanders trumpets. It would reduce inequality by eliminating unemployment and its resultant poverty. It would magnify worker power by providing an exit from the job market, thereby setting minimum standards for all sorts for private sector employment. It would eliminate employment discrimination, long a central pillar of structural racism, erasing the chief cause of recidivism. It would allow communities that currently rely on prisons to close them without toppling the local economy, thereby enabling the type of mass decarceration Sanders would do well to advocate forcefully, the better to make up for his recent blunder at Netroots Nation. It would promote ecological sustainability by making full employment independent of the resource extraction sector, by paying for low-emissions employment like elder- and childcare and by providing resources for pollution-reducing infrastructure renovation. It would guarantee dignified pay and conditions for so-called "unskilled" labor typically performed by women: domestic work, childcare and nursing. It would end reliance on increasingly expensive higher education as a prerequisite for employment. It would practically establish a public option for health care, since those availing themselves of the program would receive normal benefits for a federal employee.

All these virtues, and the program would be fiscally sound on its own. It would grow the deficit permanently – an outcome Sanders has repeatedly, to his disgrace, maintained is undesirable – but never so far that inflation, the sole danger of too big a deficit, ensues: When the business cycle is down, the program would grow to bring us up to capacity, and when a boom threatens to inflate the economy, the program would automatically shrink. As long as the job guarantee wages are not competitive with the private sector, they should serve to anchor the general price level.

Nor is this some bizarre, far-fetched idea that would hike Sanders' already uncomfortably high degree of Seeming Kooky: even without inclusion on the agenda of any mainstream political actors, a job guarantee already polls at 47 percent.

Ironically, no one touts the merits of guaranteed public employment more vigorously than modern monetary theorists like Staphanie Kelton, the chief economist for the Democratic staff on the Sanders-chaired Senate Budget Committee. I took his hiring Kelton as a signal that Sanders was preparing to run for president on a job guarantee. So far, he has given no such indication, but there remain many excruciating months until the primaries; Sanders has plenty of time to earn more fully the label he says he's not afraid of.

RollingStone