Posted on 09/09/2011 12:41:23 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Last night, Barack Obama urged Congress to “pass this jobs bill” quickly more than a dozen times in his speech to the joint session of Congress, because America couldn’t wait for the legislators to debate the merits of his proposal. Perhaps we can’t afford not to debate them, as Reuters pointed out shortly after the speech. One central program in Obama’s proposal will be built on the model used by Georgia for worker retraining, a program Obama heralded as a success:
We have to do more to help the long-term unemployed in their search for work. This jobs plan builds on a program in Georgia that several Republican leaders have highlighted, where people who collect unemployment insurance participate in temporary work as a way to build their skills while they look for a permanent job.
Perhaps the White House should have actually talked with the people running the Georgia Work$ program. Reuters’ Matthew Bigg made the effort — and discovered that even in Georgia, the program is seen as a flop. And for good reason:
A jobs program in the Southern state of Georgia, cited in President Barack Obama’s plan to fight unemployment, needs big fixes and would not work as a federal initiative, says the official who runs it. …
Georgia Work$ is being restructured to overcome significant flaws. Even within the state, it is seen as “not a marquee program,” said state Labor Commissioner Mark Butler, the Republican elected official who oversees it.
More than 30,000 people benefited from the program in the past, but in its current form, Georgia Work$ is tiny. Only 12 unemployed people signed up in August and 92 have done so since February, according to state Department of Labor statistics.
It’s not as if Georgia doesn’t have unemployed workers, either. Their unemployment rate runs above the national average (10.1%), and those workers mainly come from industries where retraining would appear to be a good idea — construction, manufacturing, and finance. Despite the large number of workers who should benefit from Georgia Work$, the fact that only 92 people applied for entry in 2011 gives a pretty solid indication that, at best, this is not a program ready to be federalized.
Even when it was in full force, the success rate of the program was poor:
Between March 2003 and July 2011, employers accepted some 32,000 participants into training.
Of those, some 24 percent who completed training were hired, officials said, although they acknowledged the program’s statistics needed to be improved. There are no figures on long-term job retention and state administrative costs have not been tallied.
Bear in mind that the program covered one of the best periods of employment in this nation’s history. Even then, only a quarter of pretrained program participants could land a job with the firms that trained them for free, when jobs were plentiful. In an environment where jobs are nonexistent, not only will such a program waste the time of the applicants, firms won’t bother spending resources on training people for jobs that they don’t plan to open.
If this is the best Obama can do in the 30 months he had between Porkulus and Porkulus II, it’s a great argument for the 2012 election … for Republicans.
Here’s how the program called GEORGIAWORK$ works:
The person on unemployment is sent to *work* for an employer and to learn a new job skill.
Employer doesn’t have to pay person so takes on half dozen employees and schedules them for 24 hrs each to train them.
Person goes in and is *trained* for 24 hrs and gets check plus unemployment from State of Georgia.
Back story...employer now has free labor and looks around and sees that his regular employees now are no longer needed so begins to cut or eliminate their hours...
Employer has unending supply of free labor and sees that he is now increasing his profit margin by *training* all these new folks...employer now has incentive to further cut his payroll costs so further cuts hours of regular employees...
Result: everyone who participates in this program now owes loyalty to the government who is paying them...
He also cited programs to make old houses more energy efficient. There was a post on FR a few days ago about the program in Seattle. They spent 20 million in stimulus money, and created 14 jobs, almost all adminstrative, and retrofited (installed insulation) in 3 houses. Now the money is gone and they want more.
And the whole purpose of the program: weatherproofing homes - resulted in a whopping 3 homes being weatherproofed under the Seattle program. 3 stinkin' homes!
Solyndra proves Obama cannot create jobs.
What job could anyone from the government ever train someone for?
ML/NJ
Solyndra Gate !!
SolyndraGate !!
>>> So whatever happened to the “Fact Checkers” that the press used to employ? <<<
LOL.... Still working hard going through Gov. palin’s trash and e-mail accounts. I think they’ve managed to work their way back into the womb with her by now.... Still bupkis.
LOL
Probably at conception by now.
bflr
A business owner is paid by the government to train the unemployed worker. Employer is also paid by government to employ the worker in his business.
The business begins to like the government money and so begins to reduce the hours of his regular employees so he can get more work out of the government paid trainee.
How obvious...there’s only so much work to do, and paying businesses to hire someone they haven’t already hired on their own, means someone is being hired when they aren’t truly needed by the business, therefore the employees who are already there are given less work to do, thereby making them poorer.
That sounds like a disaster...
That being said the current low enrollment in the Georgia program might it self be useful if the same were applied helping to cripple the existing Federal unemployment program.
That crippling of an existing Federal program in itself would be worth wile if it weren’t likely to actually hurt the existing employed population.
Finance??! They came from retraining out of manufacturing 10 years ago!
What are we supposed to retrain the credit card beavers into? Belly dancers?
How about just getting rid of Bobo & BoboCare and letting private enterprise create some freaking finance jobs for these fine Atlanta Amish...
How much of the nation’s wealth — how many trillions — has this man squandered and continues to squander? How long will we be cleaning up after his mess?
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