Even though the US government has shutdown, the BLS is still open for data downloads. That is something. More on that data another day. Today I have been working on a formal academic paper (to be presented at a conference in December) which examines the concept of “capacity-constrained” unemployment. This concept says that capacity constraints may create bottlenecks in production before unemployment has been significant reduced (this would be exacerbated if there are significant procyclical labour supply responses). In this case any expansion in government demand may have insignificant real effects – that is, the real output gap is not large enough to allow all the unemployed to gain productive jobs. This argument is often use to attack the Job Guarantee. It can be shown that while private sector investment, which is government by profitability considerations can be insufficient (during and after a recession) to expand potential output fast enough to re-absorb the unemployed who lost their jobs in the downturn, such a situation does not apply to a currency-issuing government intent on introducing a Job Guarantee. The point is that the introduction of a Job Guarantee job simultaneously creates the extra productive capacity required for program viability.