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Human Events...
The Government
Job-Training Juggernaut
by Michelle Malkin
06/10/2011
President Obama campaigned this week for “new and innovative
approaches” to America’s economic crisis. So naturally, the
futurist-in-chief filched his fresh, bold ideas straight from ... the
1930s. The grand new solution to the jobs deficit, according to the
White House, is more FDR-style federal job-training spending.
Sounding every bit like the whiteboard eggheads who keep spinning
around the Ivy League-Washington revolving door, Obama announced
breathlessly: “If we could match up schools and businesses, we could
create pipelines right from the classroom to the office or the factory
floor. This would help workers find better jobs, and it would help
companies find the highly educated and highly trained people that they
need in order to prosper and to remain competitive.”
In Obama World, private businesses are just too darned dumb to figure
out how to connect the dots and create these pipelines for themselves.
In the real world, private businesses spend up to 12 times more on
job-training programs and trainee salaries than state and federal
governments combined, according to workforce analysts. The American
Society for Training and Development reports that U.S. private entities
spent an estimated $125.9 billion on employee learning and development
in 2009 alone. And you can bet in these financial hard times that
private-sector employers are making sure every job-training penny is
well spent.
As for your tax dollars, rest assured they are being squandered the
same way public-sector job trainers have been squandering such funding
for the past eight decades. Earlier this year, a General Accounting
Office report found that no one in the bowels of the Beltway really
knows how effective the feds’ $18 billion a year spent on 47 separate
job-training programs run by nine different agencies really is. That’s
because half of those programs haven’t undergone a performance review
since 2004, and only five have ever conducted research on whether job
seekers in the program do better than those who weren’t enrolled.
Among those five, the GAO wrote, the evaluators “generally found the
effects of participation were not consistent across programs, with only
some demonstrating positive impacts that tended to be small,
inconclusive or restricted to short-term impacts.”
This much is clear. The Obama stimulus has funded vital workforce
training expenses for a $100,000 nepotistic fraud ring in Charleston,
W. V., that splurged on pet care, bar tabs and luxury hotel stays. A
con-artist family employed by the state siphoned off job-training money
that was supposed to subsidize technology education for 200 elderly
West Virginians.
In Tampa Bay, Fla., the local Workforce Alliance squandered tens of
thousands of tax dollars on lunches at Hooters, cupcake delivery fees
and VIP country music concert tickets.
In Iowa, $730,000 in federal job-training cash from the stimulus law
was redistributed to well-off graduate students to pay off their
student loan debt -- over and above the more than $205 million in
federal student financial aid those students received.
In Washington, Job Corps administrators helped themselves to untold
gobs of job-training cash by approving bogus invoices and creating
ghost employees.
And in Portage County, Ohio, investigators found that government
employees had used an estimated $700,000 in federal job-training money
to pay the college tuition of certain county officials and to purchase
other items, such as an “XBox 360, laptops, promotion bags, golf
shirts, messenger bags, briefcases, Giant Eagle food cards, and golf
tees -- among other things purchased as promotional items that are not
allowable expenses under federal law.”
Tale as old as time.
Cato Institute analyst James Bovard’s seminal work on the federal
job-training juggernaut says it all: “Many, if not most, of the
participants in federal jobs and job-training programs would be better
off today if the programs had never existed. Aside from wasting scores
of billions of dollars, government manpower programs distorted people’s
lives and careers by making false promises, leading them to believe
that a year or two in this or that program was the key to the future.
People spent valuable time in positions that gave them nothing more
than a paycheck or a certificate, while they could have been developing
real skills in private jobs with a future. The fallacy underlying all
job-training programs is that the private sector lacks the incentive to
train people for jobs.”
Remember: Government job-training programs don’t create jobs. They
create bigger government payrolls, redistribute unemployment and
perpetuate the illusion of economic recovery and prosperity. It’s a
juggernaut too big to fail and too entrenched to kill.
Read it at Human Events
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