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Despite jobs being by far the top issue with voters, the Republicans in Congress, in their rush for immediate austerity, have committed themselves to making the unemployment crisis worse. Among the many cuts in the House Republican’s continuing resolution are cuts to “excess spending in Labor Department job training programs” and eliminating funds for AmeriCorps.
With official unemployment above nine percent, cutting jobs training is an action of madness. Even if you don’t believe the employment problem right now is a lack of aggregate demand and not due to structural unemployment like some conservatives claim, the one place you should want the government to be increasing its spending is on jobs training. Quickly training unemployed construction in new skills in other fields would be the fast way to reduce the mismatch in the labor market.
AmeriCorps is one of the country’s most cost effective direct employment programs.
In essence, AmeriCorps provides tens of thousands of young people with extremely low-paying temporary jobs meant to help the community. The low level of compensation and capital spending involved per AmeriCorps member makes it one of the absolute cheapest ways for our government to directly provide employment to people and take them out of the job market.
With those under 25 being one of the groups hardest bit by our current unemployment crisis, cutting a very cheap direct employment program for young people would be an illogical disaster. It would cause tens of thousand of more young people this year to enter an already overly saturated job market that shows no signs of a quick turnaround.
Of all the thousands of things on which the government spends money, among the last things I would think about cutting during an employment crisis would be job training and extremely cost-effective direct employment program for one of the hardest hit demographics. It seems Congressional Republicans have declared a war on jobs in the guise of deficit reduction.
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Why fund training for non-existent jobs?
My daughter just completed her 2nd year as an Americorps worker. She specialized in dealing with invasive species in King County WA. Not as intense as Peace Corps, for instance, it was great public service, though. She turned down a real job with NOAA because she wanted to do public service for peace and the environment. Now she’s better prepared to go on to grad school.
I suppose if Americorps provided thousands of low-paying Wall Street interns, they’d be wanting to expand it.
Hey why should we fund these job training programs for kids who will never be Republicans?? Come on what a wast of tax payer money….. We need to give the Rich More tax breaks so they can open more burger shops and pay minimum wages and make a fortune…..what do these upstart kids want anyways????
Yeah, who needs more than $7 an hour, anyway? If these stupid kids get a two bedroom apartment and each share a room, plus put someone on the couch, that combined income is $35 an hour! 10 years of living like that and one of them might be able to afford the down payment on a house.
Here’s Boner’s attitude about jobs.
No no no no but maybe buy a Trailer but no way a house here in the Bay Area.. Shit what do they want?? To live the life of luxury?? Come Kiddy Poos Ain’t gonna happen under the new rules the Repukes are instituting… Ya gotta be good at sucking up to the Rich first..
Only white republicans should own houses, anyway.
You really have to wonder what the hell’s wrong with these persons, politicians. Do they even qualify as Americans any more?
No
The Republicans have a very simple model. Once you understand it, you can predict everything they are going to do in this area. Anything that actually helps people will help the Democrats. So, if you don’t want Democrats in power — for whatever reason — you have to sabotage the programmes that help people. Since the people who are helped don’t vote, or are not permitted to vote by various other Republican measures, it doesn’t hurt the Republicans to hurt them.
Nihilism, thy name is Republican.
And our president will try to race them there, being bipartisany the entire way.
Keep your eyes on the prize.
While this is reprehensible, on so many levels, it will most likely be vetoed if it makes to Obama’s desk. At least I hope so.
By making such inhumane demands though the Republiscum seek to make the real prize of destroying Medicaid and Social Security a more moderate proposal.
In any event, the AmericCorps kids will get screwed, and the .25 % of American fatcats will steal billions and trillions more from all of us to pay for their resource wars.
Some of those Americorps jobs are in courthouses. If people find out how legal proceedings work, they might decide that GOoPers don’t know anything….
Its not just the Americorp kids who will lose the work and experience, most of these positions are to staff non-profit programs that would not be able to afford to operate without them.
Here is West Virginia there is a summer reading enrichment program for elementary school kids who are behind in their reading skills and who will fall behind in the three months out of school. The program uses college students as teachers and mentors for 6 weeks. They get a little cash stipend and a grant for college tuition when they go back to school in the fall. It works super well, and if these people have their way it will end and the kids will just fall further behind.
Obama will sign it, he doesn’t qualify as an American either.
Yep. I once helped supervise and do admin work for an Americorps program. Some worked at a housing project in a poor neighborhood, tutoring kids after school and running a study and activity program there.
Others worked in the organization, building wheelchair ramps and fixing falling down walls, repairing plumbing, etc., for poor, mostly elderly, clients who couldn’t possibly afford to pay for the work themselves. Without that program, many recipients were trapped in their homes (no ramp to get in and out) 90% of the time. Others lived without working plumbing, because they couldn’t afford the repairs.
Some had houses whose walls were rotting away. Almost all were elderly, many also disabled, and y’know, their “generous” incomes, usually SocSec, averaged about $500/month. Many got less, especially the widows. (This was +/- 10 yrs ago).
Without the Americorps workers, none of this would’ve got done.
Oh, and most lived 4 or 5 to an apartment to save money, given their tiny stipends.
Yes, cut out Americorps, it’s a spendthrift, wasteful program.
(do I need to add the snark tag?)
“the one place you should want the government to be increasing its spending is on jobs training. Quickly training unemployed construction in new skills in other fields would be the fast way to reduce the mismatch in the labor market.”
It may reduce some theorized “mismatch,” but exactly WHAT field is currently lacking applicants? Circa 06, it was RNs, specifically. Do we still lack RN applicants?
If you’re going to assert against all reason that THE thing to do in a depression is to “re-educate” people, rather than create jobs, at least read the education press to investigate what is happening to these re-trained workers.
It shouldn’t be that hard to get information if you’re already on the national legislative beat. There are a number of Bills directed at for-profit career schools that take taxpayer subsidies, enroll massive numbers of students who never land jobs, and who default on their loans–because the jobs for which they are being (re)trained simply don’t exist.
http://thinkprogress.org/2011/02/15/predatory-school-lobbying/
And, the work doesn’t not exist just because of the depression–it didn’t exist BEFORE the depression either.
Think about it: we know one of the reasons Bush ignored the housing bubble is that it got his political *ss out of hock when the tech bubble bust in 2000. There already wasn’t any place for those people working in real estate development, construction, and sales to go.
Where do you think they’re going to go now?
2011: THE YEAR OF PROTESTS, REVOLUTIONS, WALKOUTS!
Breaking: Madison Schools Closed Due To Teacher Walk-Outs!
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945368/-BREAKING:-Madison-Schools-Closed-Due-To-Teacher-Walk-Outs!
and
THOUSANDS PROTEST AGAINST WISCONSIN GOVERNOR ‘S PLAN TO ROLL BACK UNION RIGHTS!
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/02/thousands-protest-wisconsin-governors-plan-to-roll-back-union-rights.php?ref=fpb
(The Beginning of People Not Taking GOP Cuts on the Poor & Working Class Anymore, While Extending Helping Hands to the Rich!)
“While the Obama budget does far more to maintain public investment and does endorse some progressive means of deficit reduction — like ending billions of dollars of taxpayer support for the oil industry — it also includes a number of cuts to social services that assist working class and low-income Americans.”
He also proposes to do away with tax breaks, loopholes, and shelters so that Everyone (rich and rich corporations) will have to pay their fair share!
To Really Fix Economy Here are “Five ideas:
1. Rein In The Military Budget: Neither the president’s budget or the House CR cuts the overall level of defense spending. In fact, Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s request for the Pentagon budget is a whopping $553 billion — “the largest request ever” by the Pentagon and the largest adjusted for inflation since World War II. CAP Senior Fellow Lawrence Korb has laid out $1 trillion in defense reductions that can be made over the next 10 years by phasing out outdated programs and resizing our military. This comes out to roughly $100 billion a year, which is approximately how much funding is being proposed to be cut from the Pell Grant program.” Oh by the way, there is a lot of Cronisim going on in the military with the allotment of defense contracts!
2. Reduce Or Eliminate Subsidies To Big Agribusiness: The federal government “paid out a quarter of a trillion dollars in federal farm subsidies between 1995 and 2009.” “Just ten percent of America’s largest and richest farms collect almost three-fourths” of these subsidies. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) has proposed — as a part of her progressive deficit reduction plan — a fifty percent cut in federal direct support for agriculture, which would save $7.5 billion in 2015.
3. Reduce Or Eliminate Wasteful Tax Expenditures: The CAP paper “Cracking the Code: A Closer Look at Tax Expenditure Spending” notes that “special credits, deductions, exclusions, exemptions, and preferential tax rates provide more than $1 trillion in subsidies intended to support public objectives,” yet are ineffective and should be reduced or eliminated. Eliminating this tax expenditure could save $100 billion, for example.
4. Enact A Financial Transactions Tax: A “0.25 percent tax on trades of stocks, bonds, derivatives, and other Wall Street financial instruments” would do little to nothing to reduce commerce or productivity but would generate “between $50 billion and $150 billion annually,” according to a CAP analysis.
5. Empower Medicare To Negotiate For Lower Drug Prices: One of the main drivers of the growing U.S. budget deficit is health care costs. While there are a number of things that can be done to streamline the efficiency of our health care system, like introducing a public option or even moving towards a Medicare-for-all system, one policy option that would be very simple to enact and would not require any sort of increased spending or expansion of government would be to simply allow Medicare to use its bulk purchasing power to negotiate with drugmakers for lower prices. Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) estimates that doing this could save as much as $156 billion over 10 years.
While gradually reducing the U.S. budget deficit over time is a worthwhile goal, it’s important to remember that the deficit was not caused by funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, students taking summer Pell Grants, or the LIHEAP program. Rather, the U.S. budget deficit is largely a result of massive tax cuts for the wealthy, two prolonged wars, an ever-expanding Pentagon budget, and a recession caused by Wall Street. It is only fair that those who caused the problem are those who have to pay to fix it.”
http://thinkprogress.org/2011/02/15/five-progressive-deficit-ideas/
Subsidizing education and training programs (assuming they do something more than throw money away, since Pell Grants are being cut) enlarge the candidate pool, making competition for the stagnant pool of jobs more intense, allowing private employers to lower the wage and benefit packages for said jobs. So, it’s not only a good distraction from the actual problem, it passes the money on to the political benefactors as it allows them to reduce wages on the existing workers, moreso since collective bargaining has been eliminated. It’s yet another application of Marx’ Capital Valuation of Labor observation. The only remedies are public job’s works programs (i.e., WPA, CCC, Americorps expanded) and restoration of collective bargaining. But wait, that’s lending credence to Marxist thought.