The biggest, most magical makework program ever!
Will Americans ever learn?
We’ve endured five months of bogus Obama math — most recently on display with Dear Leader’s reclassification of the United States as one of the largest Muslim countries in the world. The MSM was finally getting wise to the phony baloney stimulus numbers — and here comes the White House to dump a new load of numerical B.S. into the mix.
125,000 summer jobs for the yoots!
Presto-change-o!
I called it the David Copperfield School of Economic Recovery back in March. But I realize now what an insult that is to David Copperfield, whose illusions are still convincing.
Want to know where your federal stimulus bucks are going? Check it:
Twenty-year-olds looking for summer work commonly wind up stocking shelves at the local supermarket, or taking orders at the fast-food place down the street. But for 600 Camden County youths, and others like them all over the country, this summer will be anything but typical.
These economically disadvantaged young people will participate in summer-employment programs funded under the federal stimulus plan. The programs aim to get them ready for employment through training and job experience.
After work-readiness training, each participant will be placed in a summer job with a governmental or nonprofit agency…
…Weir said the 60 participants in the program, 52 of whom have dropped out of school, were simply not “work ready.”
Many of them don’t know, for example, that when they’re sick and can’t go to work, they need to notify a supervisor, Weir said. They don’t know how to dress for work, or that they shouldn’t have an iPod in their ears when answering phones…
“They will know the ins and the outs of the workforce,” Weir said. “By the end of the 10 weeks, these kids will be work ready.”
Howie Carr offers a reality check on make-work and hack work:
Remember the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of the 1970s – CETA? As someone pointed out Friday, this new “stimulus” summer-job boondoggle is CETA on steroids.
In Boston back then, Mayor Kevin White used CETA as his rookie-league hack farm team. The main city program was named the Youth Activities Commission. We called ’em YAC hacks. Thirty years later, I still occasionally spot an aging YAC hack on a public payroll. A lot of them ended up on the T – they really loved those 23-and-out pensions.
The federal JTPA, supported by both Democrats and Republicans, was another federal job training boondoggle exposed in the 1990s by James Bovard:
JTPA is part of a morass of federal training and employment programs. The federal government has 45 different training programs (state governments have legions more). It has run over 100 training and employment programs since 1961, most of which were abolished after they became widely recognized as failures.
Unfortunately, there is no easy solution to the failure of federal job training. Training programs that are poor waste taxpayers’ money and the trainees’ time. Training programs that are relatively effective serve mainly to redistribute unemployment. Dan Fleming, executive director of the Los Angeles County PIC, concluded, “Training meant that one person got a job instead of another, not that jobs or wages increased.”(94) The Job Council of the Ozarks in Springfield, Missouri, sent employers a notice that read, “Cut your labor costs. Before you hire another employee, talk to Job Council of the Ozarks and save thousands of dollars.”
There is no shortage of job training in the private sector. The American Society for Training and Development estimated that the private sector spends over $200 billion a year on training. The U.S. economy is creating millions of new jobs each year, and employers have a natural interest in training people to fill those jobs. As Charles Murray, the author of Losing Ground, observed, “The best job training program is run by an employer who needs to get a job done. That’s the one situation where everyone has the maximum incentive to push in the right direction.”
In survey after survey, private employers have said that as long as new employees are literate, know how to learn, and have a good work attitude, it is relatively easy to train them. It does not make sense to attempt to remedy the failings of government education programs by means of a government job training program.
And then there’s the Americorps boondoggle, also kept afloat by both Dems and Republicans, that put people to work pushing paper in federal bureaucracies and lobbying for ACORN against California initiatives.
The more things change…
***
Patterico reads the fine print:
“As a result of this accelerated pace of activity, over 600,000 jobs are expected to be created or saved by the Recovery Act in the second 100 days – four times the number created or saved in the first 100 days,” the White House will say in a statement being released this morning..
By the way, for amusement purposes, compare the implicit boast here of 150,000 jobs “created or saved” with the actual numbers set forth in the article:
The promised boost in employment will not offset the job losses of recent months — with more than 1.6 million jobs shaved from the economy since Congress approved the stimulus plan in February. Unemployment last month reached 9.4 percent, the highest since 1983.
And we’re going to do four times that well?
Somebody pinch me.
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Yeah, and I’m sure those 125,000 jobs for yoots is really going to jump start the economy. Three months of employment. I’m impressed.
At least they’ll get some “work” experience. We can only hope, considering today’s yoots don’t want to do much of anything and want everything handed to them on a silver plate.
Platter. Sorry, I have lunch on the brain.
The Prestige:
Alfred Borden: You went half way around the world… you spent a fortune… you did terrible things… really terrible things Robert, and all for nothing.
Robert Angier: For nothing?
Alfred Borden: Yeah
Robert Angier: You never understood, why we did this. The audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It’s miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you… then you got to see something really special… you really don’t know?… it was… it was the look on their faces…
Smoke and mirrors. The MSM will never call him on it. Never.
I’m trying to make sense of this
when compared to this:
Because isn’t any job you have “training” and “job experience”? Everyone’s got to start somewhere, right?
But then I get my answer:
My best guess is that most of the governmental/nonprofit agencies are more than left-leaning and in the bag for Obama.
So leave the jobs at fast food places to illegal immigrants, youths are far too important to do something as menial as wait on people.
GM is still the Poster Child of government welfare make-work…
Compare Ford and GM, roughly similar sales, but figures I saw recently (please correct me) show Ford with about 55,000 workers, and GM with 287,000! For similar sales. That means your tax dollars went to about 230,000 workers that should be , um, elsewhere…
Our descent into the economic thunder-mug is accelerating.
It will get worse long before it gets better. It cannot be otherwise, given the things this myth-based administration and corrupt Congress have put in place already.
They have to be stopped.
REFUSE TO BE EATEN
No way this didn’t come from The Onion.
If I were an employer, there’s no way I’d hire a “graduate” of this program. That level of stupid should be painful.
So we have to have a gubmint program to teach young folks how to act mature??? Nanny state at it’s best. You know liberals believe so much in Darwin and that whole survival of the fitest thing except when it comes to the losers in our society.
I originally posted this on May 19th. (I don’t think there is any way to embed quotes within quotes, but hopefully it will make sense.) I’ve sent it to our local conservative talk-show host and to Rush. I’ve still seen NOTHING on this anywhere. How do we follow up on this??
Hey! I just checked KY’s projects too. Guess what I found?
WTH?!?!?! Is every state going to send millions of dollars to Hawaii? (Can someone say “hush money?)
Then I decided to go back and look at each state… EVERY state, with the exceptions of Kansas and Montana are sending a piece of the pie to Hawaii. What’s the grand total, you ask? Good question!! Drumroll please….
~$273M for this one agency in Hawaii!!
Just for kicks, I decided to look up the total for Homeland Security… They get $352M. The entire DHS! Department of Defense? $188M. Yep. They get less than this one agency in Hawaii. Department of Veterans Affairs? A paltry $11M.
What a disgrace. MM — Please, please don’t let this go! They’ve hidden this needle in a haystack, and it needs to be brought out into the open.
Summer yoot jobs?
By the time the bureaucrats gets it figured out what Ogubermint jobs to offer to yoots, the summer will be over.
If one really wants to magically create summer yoot jobs, offer tax deductions to folks for hiring yoots to help out around the house.
Like many folks, I could quickly come up with an almost endless list of honeydo jobs that could be handed off for nearly full time yoot summer employment — IF I didn’t have to pay taxes on my income BEFORE I pay a yoot to work around the house.
In other words — GIVE US TAX CUTS MR. PRESIDENT — we’ll quickly provide the jobs you’ve locked away up chasing the windmills of the big Gubermint Stimulus fiasco…
Another waste of time, energy and money.
125,000 “summer youth jobs” is like P’ing in the ocean … nothing … nada … no impact …
You could find several times that many “youths” looking for summer jobs in every major city in this country …
As I have said many times before …
The Obama Copperfield Illusion continues …
Welcome to the world of Dan Inuoye, Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Obama doesn’t have the pull…
Well I was one of those “thousands of jobs created”. Hired for census work. Told it was to last for 11 weeks (not long enough for unemployment you’ll note) then all of us let go after only 4 weeks of work. So we padded the employment rolls but didn’t add to the unemployment rolls. More magic numbers.
drfredc: You’d allow any one of these “yoots” into your own home? That’s quite a risk.
Oh Please! The only yoots who are not economically disadvantaged are the children of the rich. The rest of us went out and found our own damn jobs as kids.
How about they get that job experience the old fashion way. GET A FREAKIN JOB!
I started on a farm for $.65 an hour at 12 years old. But I wouldn’t expect todays gimmie, gimmie, genaration to do a job that includes actual work. They would be stealing a job from an undocumented immigrant.
And on the 8th Day Obama said, “Let there be jobs.” And there were jobs, and Obama saw the jobs and said, “Isn’t the expanded ACORN good?”
/sarc
That’s because they haven’t been to College yet. That sort of discipline is taught in the Universities, along with how evil their own country is, and how to drink and commit sodomy.
Wouldn’t deporting millions of illegal aliens free up a lot of summer jobs, and year around jobs for that matter?
I guess no one has thought of that yet….and they never will.
Two words-
Job Patronage
Applying Chicago machine politics to federal level. Pretty cut and dry.
There is a way to provide virtually full employment.
It is a dead-bang guarantee, and something we KNOW from economic law.
Flush the minimum wage.
The result would seem like magic to people who don’t understand economics.
Roger that!
I have been an Immigration Officer for 20 years. The reason I have a job is that there are plenty of jobs in the USA.
Period.
When I no longer have a reason to do my job, then “unemployment” will be a valid problem. It’s easy for me to pontificate because, when I was a trainee, most of the illegals I took out of chicken processing plants and construction sites made more per hour than I did. I guarantee you that the Men and women below E-4 in the Armed Forces earn less than the average illegal alien.
Until then, unemployment longer than a month is (the vast majority of times) only due to people not wishing to take jobs “beneath” the level they are accustomed to.
Sorry but that’s the way it is.
Actually, that could also create thousands of jobs doing roundups for deportation that is. Practice for Obama’s Domestic Police Force.
There is that program called City Year where kids wear those red jackets and do volunteer community stuff.
I propose a program called Sit a Year wherein youths are actually paid to do nothing for an entire year.
Hey – it makes as much sense as what is currently going on!
This may sound like chest-thumping, but…
Among my ridiculously large skill-set, I am an experienced heavy equipment operator. I operate virtually any machine you’d care to name, including several types of crane.
At one point in my adult life, with a family of kids that needed fed, I could not find any work as an operator.
I went to work as a common laborer. It wasn’t too long before the contractor needed a warm butt, with some skills, to cover a machine that was idle. Before too long, I was doing what I do well, but only because I was willing to operate a “side-boom” (a shovel) first.
amen.
When this Administration trots out its “We have saved 150,000 jobs!” or “We have saved 600,000 jobs!” or “We have saved ten jobs!” someone needs to make a simple request of the spokesperson carrying the water for The One — “Please specifically identify just two jobs that have been saved by this action.”
I call it the “Name 2″ campaign.
Likely the response will be the sound of crickets…
LOL, Ragspierre–good for you.
At least you’re not a poseur like our teleprompter-in-chief.
With said spokesperson displaying the ‘deer in the headlights stare…’
That’s what usually happens with many of the hihg school yoots, hired for the summer, where I work…mostly doing nothing. A few take the “busy” work they are given to do seriously, but most play computer games when no one’s looking which is often, take really long breaks, and mysteriously dissapear for hours….that is for the days they actually show up for work.
I retired from the Navy at the ripe old age of 38. I went from sitting in front of missile launch consoles on submarines to getting a job as an apprentice for the Honolulu Board of Water. I installed water meters and fixed broken mains. I came home tired and stinking every day.
I disliked it considerably (hate is such a strong word), but I never considered it beneath me, especially since I was the oldest apprentice they had ever had.
After three years, I found something easier and better paying. I would never, ever trade the skills, rudimentary as they were, that I learned and the comraderie of guys doing “grunt” work. It was an eye opener.
Spin is campaign rhetoric, not policy. Five months into the Obama Administration, and there is nothing left but spin, spin, and more spin.
Tax, tax, tax, and spin.
Tax, tax, tax, and spin.
I instantly pictured those two black Panthers armed with clubs outside of the polls as being employed to “educate” these yoots in the ways of The One.
If this recession was “years in the making” (back to the problems Democrats created by allowing sub-prime mortgages), the problem caused by Obama’s solutions will take decades to heal, if then. Those minimum wage jobs he’s creating won’t buy much when inflation kicks in and we’re paying a wheelbarrow full of money for a loaf of bread — if we can find it.
And informing these people of these little tidbits requires weeks, or perhaps months of “Training”??????
I’d need about 60 seconds to perform the equivalent “work readiness training”.
This is welfare. Not a job. Who do they think they are kidding?
The main reason we will be bankrupt this or next year is because obama forgot the “tax” part of the tax and spend cycle.
My first summer job was re-stacking books in the local library, and I had to learn how to read the Dewey Decimal System to do it. I learned something, but then I wasn’t training for a lifetime job at the post office. Or the library, actually. Although I do visit.
I’ve always thought the very idea of PAYING “volunteers” like Americorps does is idiotic, but then, that’s the government, so what do you expect?
Obama speak sounds so very much like that in Ayn Rands “We the Living”
I loved that movie too. My whole family says: “Mrs. Riley, and only Mrs. Riley.”
You have a point about make work.
I’m also not comfortable relying on administration estimates on the number of jobs saved. There is no independent way to know they are being honest (insert snark here). The yoot job creation program at least has a measurable statistic.
Fixed it.
When you don’t have numbers to support your position … just make them up!
Shame it’s been going on for so long.
RWR
http://www.rightwingrocker.com
Before we can ask “the President” anything, we need to get a president.
Not some foreign-born interloper with nice teeth.
RWR
http://www.rightwingrocker.com
It still amazes me that the media implies that doing this type of work would be beneath a 20 year old with ZERO skills in the working environment! In the early 70s around age 14, I delivered newspapers in the morning before I went to school. (I don’t have to explain why kids can’t do this today as things were different then) A couple of years later, at the age of 17, I stocked shelves at a local store in the afternoons. I also worked at a restaurant washing dishes at 17 on the weekends. This type of work was not beneath me. This to me was an opportunity. I learned at a young age what was required of me to keep my job(s). Following instruction, learning to take orders from others, punctuality, etc. There were times in later years that I was laid-off from a position and there were times that I left a position for a better one, but I was never fired! What type of work do these 20 year olds with no experience expect in this economic climate? They have a college degree, so what? If you don’t have any experience, you’ll have to start at the bottom and work your way up the ladder like the rest of us. Now they’re out in the REAL world and it’s brutal. Your boss isn’t going to care if you need to “find” yourself. Your boss IS going to care if you can perform the job he’s paying you to do. If you can’t, you’ll be down the road kicking rocks.
…going back even further than the 70’s:
On one of the Air Force bases in Fla I used to work at, a tractor would come by occasionally, pulling a huge rotary mower, cutting the tall grass along a canal.
Later, I see a crew of guys with those “idiot sticks” — you know, it looks like a golf club handle, with a blade, that you whack away at grass with — I see these guys down by the canal, whackin’ away, where the tractor would usually be.
After asking around, re what became of the tractor, I find out that it had been replaced … by these guys, from the Job Corps. Remember that one?
As Michelle is saying: “…the more things change …”
Who are you and what did you do with the real lgm
From my observation, most of them already learned to be slackers in our publice
educationindoctrination system. These 10 weeks merely offer many the opportunity to sharpen their slacker skills and get paid for it.The Job Corps has changed, they actualy train the kids now. Its a good program that is one of the few that are worth the money. I have a few relatives on my wifes side who have gone through it and it really turned them arround.
Haven’t read other comments yet, so forgive me if someone else has comment on this:
Would whoever is responsible for funding this boondoggle care to explain how someone who can afford an iPod can be described as economically disadvantaged?
The cost of one of those iPods would take care of a child in Malawi for a lot longer than this summer. How about a trade: that iPod in exchange for some real world job training?
Obama math demonstrated.
No snark necessary. When you’re right, people should acknowledge it. Of course there is no way for them to determine a “saved” job. The bottom line is that employment dropped by around 350,000. Everybody else’s job was “saved” at least for the moment. On the other hand, the summer make-work jobs will do nothing for the economy, although they may take some gang-bangers off the street for a while and thereby improve the general environment for a few months.
I would like one of the resident libtards to define a “saved” job for me. Please include in that definition what the government did to contribute to the save.
See, in my 45 years of work experience, the only one that has saved or lost any of my various jobs is me.
When my present employer opens his doors tomorrow and I show up for work, is that because my job was saved? Would it matter if I insisted that my situation resulted from my outstanding performance and that without me my employer would have to close his doors with no jobs saved. That it was actually my co-worker, Susan, whose job was saved because she’s kind of a slacker and the only way she could keep a job was if it was saved? And rumor has it that Susan will claim Rob’s job was saved, not hers. Hmmm, that saved job category … it’s a slippery one isn’t it?
“After work-readiness training, each participant will be placed in a summer job with a governmental or nonprofit agency…”
There’s the money quote!
Acorn, prepare for incoming!
You seem incredibly ungrateful for the largesse The One has bestowed on you…
Dare I say it?
Way to go lgm.
Summer job creation by the gooberment? Doomed to fail on an epic level.
What’s most annoying about this is that the young’uns who do find work will credit Obama! GRRRRRR!!!
Here’s something you haven’t seen before:
Good post, lgm.
I personally saved 33,000 jobs this morning before breakfast and I dare any of you to prove me wrong.
I’ve said it before but that movie is actually very good when it comes to accurately portraying criminal procedure.
That’s the essence of the matter: Hope-a-Dope knows that he can just sh*t numbers of “created” or “saved” jobs, and that his intended audience of liberal media and liberal Ignorati will take is as Gospel and start parroting it like it’s already accomplished fact without bothering to find out whether it’s true.
What we’re dealing with in today’s donkey party is a collection of ideologues so warped by their “Too Big to Fail” blind faith in Teleprompter Jesus that objective reality just bounces off of them.
Hope-a-Dope could literally say, “We’re going to pay off the deficits by mining cheese from the moon” and most donks would buy it without question; even if what remains of their common sense would try to object, they’d overcome the objection. That’s how bad the situation has become.
I would have picked The Godfather….
You could learn a lot about criminal procedure from da Don…
If Prez Obama needs any help with his magic act, he can call Mayor Herenton here in Memphis, Tennessee. Because of the Mayors gracious generosity, his friends have been appointed to the 283 appointed positions over and above what the City Charter allows costing $16 million dollars a year in 2005 and over $60 million in future pensions due to the January 2001 pension resolutions allowing elected and appointed officials to retire after 12 years of service regardless of age. Mayor H. has run amuck in Memphis, gaining a reputation for hiring his “friends” to senior staff positions who have no qualifications to the 6 figure salaried positions with, in some cases, disastrous negative results.
That fad diet of “Pablum for the Naive” was all the rage last year and I see a few of their pitchmen still hang out here try to make socialism seem cool and compassionate!
There are plenty of places that already practice collectivism so why not pack up and move to those wonderful societies!
America was never meant to be homogenized, the individual is insoluble, especially in your liberal stinking brew!
Fight Liberal Distortions and Deceptions!
America is a place for true freedom and liberty, and no man is free who depends on government to take care of his every need!
With unemployment at 9.4% and expected to at least reach 10% and millions of of illegals here taking jobs Americans would do, this piddly summer job farce, and temporary construction jobs, announcement could only be applauded by
the brownest of noses, which most people surrounding Obama seem to be employed to do!
Since everyone else is going to be taxed up the wazoo, how about we tax the time spent by these young people, that have an appendage hanging from their ears, for the benefits of the taxpayer funded education? Taking the first 2 or 3 paychecks just like you and me. There is no such thing as a free lunch in ‘Bambi’s new world order.
I tried giving a job to a high school yoot once. She showed up to the interview in pajamas… ‘why get dressed for something that’s only going to last 30 minutes tops (referring to the interview)?’
She also told me she didn’t have to work at all… I could just write in the number of hours so she’d get credit…
You just can’t make this stuff up. She was supposedly one of the ‘brighter’ kids.
What a monster of a gov’t that has been created in the USA.
Ron Smith a local talk show host on WBAL quoted someone who said, “Members of Congress are like temple monkees who are picking through the ruins of America looking for bribes.”
All that money going to Hawaii is the bribe for the Hawaii gov’t keeping BHO’s birth certificate or lack of from becoming public.
Uh huh. With today’s brats, I highly doubt they will know much beyond how to ignore those phone calls in favor of listening to their Ipod.
“Jeez do I HAVE TO answer that call?”
When I was 16, I was told I qualified for some sort of jobs program, it may have been CETA (many years ago), I worked my azz off for the 300 hours I was allowed to work. Only 300 hours because when the fed was done paying the wages, I was gone.
Don’t know what happened to the work after my 300 hours was up. Maybe the overpaid county employee (who was my supervisor) had to do it then.