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The Spectacle Blog
The Obama administration is hinting at some of the job-creation plans that the president plans to announce in a speech next month. Although the administration had promised “a very specific plan to boost the economy, to create jobs and to control our deficit,” Philip Klein notes, it is now gesturing at merely an “outline” of possible actions.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the outline will include three parts, all intended to ease the long-term unemployed back into work. The first is a measure based on an unemployment program in george called Georgia Work$, which uses unemployment insurance funds to pay unemployed people to train for work at businesses. The other two ideas are more infrastructure spending and tax incentives for firms that hire new workers.
Taken together, these ideas won’t amount to much, and certainly aren’t equal to the problem of joblessness across the nation. The Georgia Work$ program, at least, is a new idea, to give the administration some credit. But it’s not necessarily a good one.
The idea behind Georgia Work$ is that by paying people to train for new jobs instead of for being unemployed, the government can remove the disincentives to finding a new job inherent to unemployment. Not only does that spur people to get back to work, but it also saves the government money it would have spent on extra weeks of unemployment benefits for those people. The Georgia government does report saving some funds with the program.
It might not transition well to the federal level, though, for a number of reasons. First, according to the Journal article, only about 6,000 workers have been hired by the companies they were placed with by Georgia Work$. Given that there are almost half a million unemployed people in Georgia and about 14 million unemployed Americans overall, it’s clear that this plan wouldn’t come close to addressing the country’s larger economic problems. Furthermore, Georgia Work$ seems to be exactly the kind of program that would benefit from a federalist approach — letting other states adopt Georgia’s model and tinker with it to find better approaches. That process seems to be already happening, with a number of other states trying to copy Georgia Work$. Why get the federal government involved?
As for infrastructure spending and tax incentives for hiring: the 2009 stimulus bill demonstrated, famously, that infrastructure spending isn’t a short-term solution for unemployment (i.e., “shovel-ready wasn’t as shovel-ready as we expected). If there are infrastructure projects worthwhile for their own value, then by all means pay for them, but otherwise there’s no point. Also, the Obama folks have already tried a number of tax credits for small business to incentivize hiring with only limited success.
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More Blog Posts by Joseph Lawler
http://spectator.org/blog/2011/08/22/jobs-ideas-as-scarce-as-jobs-t
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MONCLER JACKETS ON SALE | 8.22.11 @ 11:38AM
I agree you.
Bill Hussein O'Stalin| 8.22.11 @ 12:07PM
If any of that comes to fruition, then it becomes obvious that there are no realistic job plans being formulated from inside the beltway, only spending plans which will suck up more of the nation's life blood, only to squander it on more unworkable bureaucratic compliance.
There is no bureaucratic incentive possible at this point and that's the problem.
The best thing for Washington to do at this point is nothing. Washington, D.C. Inc. has wrecked the economy and amazingly the private sector is responding with tough love which is precisely what is needed to correct the problems which originated with the central planners who continue to believe they know best. They don't and the economic shambles we see proves that.
Derek Leaberry| 8.22.11 @ 12:18PM
Sadly, tens of millions of Americans are unemployable with few, if any, skills.
A long term conservative goal should be to make it easier for mothers to work at the home for their family. Not only is a raise in child deduction in order, perhaps mothers should be paid to remain out of the work force.
Trinacria| 8.22.11 @ 3:41PM
Brilliant idea! Let's pay more people NOT to work. And now that Obamacare has defined childhood up to the age of 26, we can pay moms to stay at home and tend to their little'uns until they turn 27!
Incidently, if that child is female, SHE can have a child at 27 and we can pay HER not to work for the next 26 years (if the child has the misfortune of being male, his best option will be to get a government job, in which case he'll have to work until the ripe old age of 50, then retire with a full pension and benefits).
Yes - by golly I like this approach. When deep in debt, dig yourself deeper.
solidground| 8.22.11 @ 12:40PM
It sounds like FDR all over again.
Ken (Old Texican)| 8.22.11 @ 12:44PM
Manufacture ten thousand modular nuke plants, build a thousand drilling rigs with horizontal drilling capability, and have government swear off of regulating business to death.
...Shoot all the lawyers, and have tax returns on a postcard.
TA DA!
c. j. acworth| 8.22.11 @ 6:08PM
I think you've pretty much got it, Ken. Energy is the lifeblood of any economy. Free it up, that's half the battle. Then declare a moratorium on new regulations of ANY kind, maybe even a repeal of all regulations passed within the last , say, three years. All of them. Then see what happens.
JFGalt| 8.22.11 @ 1:09PM
Training people for jobs that do not exist? It's plain useless.
Trinacria| 8.22.11 @ 4:07PM
It's worse than that, JFG. Ask yourself who will be doing the "training". Two possibilities:
1) The government will create a new agency tasked with the responsibility of "training" the unemployed. The agency will assume the form of a classic government beaurocracy, complete with thousands of marginally witted employees (most of whom are named Shaniqua, Taniqua, or some version thereof, and few of whom will actually be involved in the act of "training" job seekers). Ultimately, the mission of the agency will morph into "minority outreach" rather than skills training and the training will be more about pc indoctrination than hands on skills.
2) The government will contract out the "training" to designated training centers which will need to be in full compliance with thousands of pages of regulations, including OSHA, EPA, EEO, HHS, USDA, FCC, FAA, SEC, and any other agency that publishes federal regulations. Additionally, all employees of designated training centers must, as a condition of designation, complete government mandated courses in occupational health and safety, equal employment opportunity, sexual harassment, americans with disabilities regulations, and sensitivity training. Moreover, the designated centers will be required to meet stringent gender and ethnicity hiring quotas, with a particular emphasis on "underserved" communities.
So - in the end - the program will be far worse than useless; it will be a further slide into nanny state doctrine that will serve the dual aims of creating further dependency and destroying the economy... (after all, isn't that what "community organizing" is all about?).
james wilson| 8.22.11 @ 1:16PM
"New" ideas were what got us into this, old ideas will get us out.
Lesser Weevil| 8.22.11 @ 1:53PM
What is the logic of these training programs? Where will the demand for these newly trained workers come from? Are there really businesses out there saying "we'd love to expand, but doggone it, we can't find anyone to hire?" In boom times, sure, but now? If there are any such cases, I'd bet that the employees in short supply are highly skilled and unlikely to emerge from a government program.
On the other hand, the Old Texican's plan sounds great! We could heat our homes next winter by burning the Federal Register.
Wayne | 8.22.11 @ 2:24PM
I think all Obama would have to do to save the economy is to go on record and say that he was wrong. That he grew the government too fast and went too far and this policies of rules and regulations have killed the marketplace. He can then end these practices and the stock market and businesses would respond with record breakthroughs.
It is so ironic that the reality is the the entire US nation is more flexible that one man in the White House.
martin j smith| 8.22.11 @ 2:27PM
The Obama administration has only ONE position-Tax and Spend grow government. They are rulers that represent the Government-Dependent class. Obama is not the President of the Capitalist class so HIS ideas only represent his own constituency and totally ignore more than half of the nation. The question I put on the table
is this: Why would a President of the United States refuse to relate to a work with half of the nation and with the possibility of success if the dream of "real compromise" ? I maintain two interrelated theories: He is a trojan Horse candidate and he is basically out to collapse the nation-destroy capitalism . That is it. The more I hear him the more I can believe he is confirming my theories. Even if he is simply"stubborn" or "incompetent" that is bad enough.
Flee| 8.22.11 @ 3:14PM
I liked an idea I read elsewhere where we could have UE recipients man batteries of upright stationary bikes 24-7 to generate electricity for their areas. This would help them with their usual battle with obesity, keep them from complaining about nothing to do and get some production from the UE payments. A US manufacturer could be contracted to build the new bikes too. It sounds like a winning strategy for a forward thinking politician. Obama is that guy. How could he not love the idea? He could even install video screens on the bikes that could run continuous loops of Obama's greatest hits from his speeches. That would be the clincher I am certain.
MyGirlFriday| 8.22.11 @ 4:12PM
I thought the Georgia $ Plan (Adult Subsidized Employment Program as it is known in Georgia) you are discussing here has already been set up and administered by the Federal Government. My understanding is that the program fell under the TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) which was part of the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009 which created a "new" TANF emergency fund to assist states in expanding services during the recession. States that increased spending on assistance, short term, non-recurrent benefits, or "subsidized employment" during FY2009 or 2010 were able to receive 80% reimbursement of the incurred costs from the federal government. The fund also ended in September, 2010. Eligibility for the employment program are for low income families only. These training jobs are for six month only and the employers are not obligated to hire the person at the end of the six months. It is very likely these people will be once again on the unemployment rolls after six months, thus loosing the skills they were taught. What does an employer say at the end of six months, after his subsidy runs out from the fed.'s sorry, I can't keep you on as I haven't the money...... the onus will be on the employer. No thanks! We already know that "stimulus" doesn't work, it only prolongs the inevitable.