Why Can't Bush Plans Help Unemployment- Part I

Feb 1, 2004

George Bush wants to give $250 million to Community Colleges for job training, on the theory that it will reduce unemployment. Sad to say, it won't, and most grade school children could tell you why, based on their own experience.

Have you ever played "musical chairs?" This once-popular children's game involves sitting a bunch of children on two rows of chairs placed back to back. When each child is seated, the music starts, and the children start circling the chairs in time to the music. While the music is playing someone takes away one of the chairs. When the music stops each child must quickly sit down, and one child is left without a chair and has to leave the game. This continue until only one child is seated. Note that as chairs get harder and harder to find, when the music stops the winning seating technique tends to change and involve a bit more strength or leverage to settle ties.

Now instead of children, think "workers," and instead of chairs think "jobs." Now instead of "takes a chair away" think "outsources a job." Does this sound familiar? Picture the workers without jobs circling the chairs as more and more are removed in the name of productivity or replaced with less expensiive chairs in another location. If you identify with all that, think about what the Bush job training plan will do for the unemployed workers. By giving them better qualifications, they are individually more likely to get jobs. No one should deny that, those particular workers will be better off. Then President Bush can point to that change for the better and say "my job training program is a proven success." The statement will be true for the participants, but it won't mean that there are significantly fewer people out of work.

The problem is that there are no more jobs than there were, and so for every trained worker who can now find a job, there will eventually be another unemployed person looking for one. That's great for businessmen, the President's friends, because now there are more trained workers to do the jobs, the training was paid by the taxpayers, and there will still be about as many unemployed workers, so these newly-skilled workers are likely to be willing to work for lower wages than would be needed to attract attract them if there were enough jobs to go around.

In short the benefits are mostly to the businessmen, the cost is mostly to the taxpayers, and we have trained people to sit down faster instead of providing more chairs.

Next time, what's wrong with another Bush proposal, and at the end of the month what politically unpopular steps are needed to improve employment and help the economy.