George Rebane
[This is the transcript of my radio commentary broadcast on 16 September 2011 over KVMR-FM.]
President Obama’s latest economic stimulus program – the half trillion dollar Ameircan Jobs Act – also contains the next tranche of funding for the next government training program that supersedes his 2009 Green Summer Jobs Corps for youth. The new program will be modeled after Georgia Work$ – that’s spelled with an ending dollar sign. Well Georgia Work$ doesn’t actually work, but its dollar sign does indicate that it is just the latest of government training programs that have cost taxpayers a bundle, and to have failed utterly to do anything close to what they were set up to do.
To understand this brand new jobs training programs, we have to go way back to 1962 when Congress gave us the Manpower Development and Training Act (or MDTA). It was supposed to train workers who were losing jobs to advancing technology. It quickly became a bureaucratic mess that performed so poorly, that the Dept of Labor had to fudge its performance statistics. The GAO or Government Accounting Office blew the whistle on them two years later. But true to bureaucratic and political inertia, the MDTA continued operating and wasting money for a total of eleven years before its plug was pulled.
James Bovard in the WSJ reports that “a 1969 government study warned that teens in federal jobs programs ‘regressed in their conception of what should reasonably be required in return for wages paid’.” In short, that program and similar ones to follow also taught young people bad work habits.
The time for this commentary does not let me go into the gory details in the litany of government training programs. But it is important to at least list this trail of federally funded follies. After the Manpower Development and Training Act crashed and burned, Congress passed the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (or CETA) in 1973. This farce went on for 15 years, and was simply a massive step’n fetchit hire program for helpers to various government agencies. No statistics whatsoever were kept by the government, and in the mid-80s an Urban Institute study concluded that young men going through the program suffered “significant earnings losses” and women obtained no benefit at all in their follow-on employments.
After CETA became the next national ‘laughing stock’, Congress replaced it with the Job Training Partnership Act in 1982 – typical of Congressional wisdom, if something doesn’t work, then do it again and spend a lot more money doing it. The Job Training Partnership Act turned out so badly that, according to the Labor Department’s inspector general, more of its ‘graduates’ wound up on welfare than similar control groups without the training which included how to apply for all kinds of government handout programs. These people received the finest education available on how to become lifelong welfare kings and queens.
Better late than never, after eleven years of the JTPA, the Labor Department discovered in 1993 that the training "actually reduced the earnings of male out-of-school youths” by 10%. Thirty years into constant failures, do you think that any politician inside the Beltway had learned anything. Not a chance.
Instead we saw Congress replace the JTPA in 1998 with something called the Workforce Investment Act, and on this round the Labor Department by law was required to report on its effectiveness in 2005. Now I know by this time you’re too smart to hold your breath for such an early look/see after seven years of spending, pardon me, ‘investing’ in more federal training. No sirree, the Labor Department instead told Congress that it will see what it can do by 2015, ten years late, in reporting on the latest disaster, and seventeen years after the cash spigots on the program were opened.
We already know the Workforce Investment Act is the latest in this series of failures by just having witnessed President Obama re-investing in jobs training not once, as in 2009, but just last week introducing us to a federal lookalike of Georgia Work$, the newest program that started this little walk down memory lane.
In the end it’s actually much worse than that. Today there are 47 overlapping federal workforce training programs costing $18B annually, none can demonstrate that they actually don’t harm their trainees, forget about helping them. And with this record, our government continues to pour money into this bottomless pit for the only visible purpose of keeping numb-brained bureaucrats employed, and re-electing politicians who tout these programs to voters innocent of history. For more, please read Bovard’s article available through the transcript to this commentary.
On a happier note, I’m pleased to announce that KVMR News Director Paul Emery and I will be having a “civil discussion of current events that spans the political divide” featured as The Great Dialogue by the Nevada County Tea Party Patriots. This event will held be at the Nevada County Horseman’s Club in Grass Valley on Tuesday the 27th of September at 6:30PM. We will be appearing as private individuals not representing KVMR or the Tea Party Patriots. Please join us for this free admission event.
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on these and other themes in my Union columns, and on georgerebane.com where this transcript appears. These opinions are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
[17sep2011 update] I have been informed that KVMR chose to delete the paragraph beginning with "On a happier note …" and the commentary was broadcast without that paragraph. The ostensible reason was that it promoted an event for which KVMR was not a sponsor. I will have more to say about this after talking to the folks at the radio station.
rebanesruminations.com 
Leave a comment