Free Republic

Ukraine is a jobs program for the "military industrial complex." Senate Minority Leader Mitch “Glitch” McConnell spoke at the defense industry-funded CEPA Forum in Washington D.C. .. and made a very revealing comment about the state of the war in Ukraine.

By the time the I-95 reconstruction is complete, you’ll probably be too old to have to worry about a commute. The same goes for the planners, engineers, managers, and laborers who for more than a decade have worked to rebuild the highway’s 51 miles in Pennsylvania from the ground up. Their careers at PennDot or with contractors will almost surely end before construction does. “I don’t know that I think about too much that I’m not going to be here,” said Elaine Elbich, PennDot’s portfolio manager for the I-95 project. Elbich plans with a span of decades in mind. From...

Every election, politicians talk about the need for more job training programs. What they don't tell voters is that the government already spends billions on job training. Most of it is wasted. Last week, The New York Times reported that one of the biggest and oldest federal job training programs — the $1.7 billion Job Corps — is failing those it's supposed to help. The story points to an audit of the program by the Labor Department's Office of Inspector General, which found that despite its large budget, and the fact that 50,000 students enroll every year, the Job Corps...

A government-funded job training program that promised to turn hundreds of residents of Kentucky’s coal country into computer coders so far has spent $2 million to place 17 people in tech jobs and may have left others worse off, The Daily Signal has learned. The program, a private-public partnership between state and federal agencies and Interapt, a Louisville-based software development company, is a product of President Barack Obama’s TechHire Initiative of 2015. The job training program, budgeted for a total of $4.5 million, was supposed to last through 2019 and train up to 200 people from an economically depressed region...

The Department of Labor has awarded Utica, New York, $2 million to teach young refugees how to build drones as part of a summer jobs program. About 400 teenage refugee students living in the city will get part-time summer jobs through the program, as well as tutoring in English and Math. Those who demonstrate academic competence will then take part in a year-long drone building challenge during the school year, as the work and tutoring continues. The 14- and 15-year-old refugee students will learn how to design a drone and then construct their own model using the lab of the...

Via D.C.Clothesline, After U.S. State Department Spokeswoman Marie Harf announced that the long-term strategy in the fight against ISIS was to create jobs for potential jihadists, countless terrorists began filling out applications. Here are a few examples (along with a blank application for potential jihadists on the job hunt)...

CNBC: "Are you happy that the way it is being described. Is the program that the White House has presented a million dollars and over your program? " Warren Buffett: "Well, the precise program which will -- I don't know what their program will be. My program would be on the very high incomes that are taxed very low. Not just high incomes. Somebody making $50 million a year playing baseball, his taxes won't change. Make $50 million a year appearing on television, his income won't change. But, if they make a lot of money and pay a very low...

President Obama announced Thursday night that he is looking to reform and extend unemployment benefits for millions of Americans, pitching a national job training program modeled on one already underway in Georgia. That program, called Georgia Work$, has been hailed as a major success by state labor officials. President Obama even cited it in a recent speech as an example of a "smart" program for putting people back to work. Critics, however, contend that the program's benefits may be overblown, and some worry that the program itself may violate federal labor laws. A key part of Obama's jobs plan is...

NEW YORK, - New York officials said it will cost about $27.5 million to replace all of the city's street signs to conform to national standards. The New York City Department of Transportation said the signs, which feature street names in all capital letters, will be replaced with signs featuring both capital and lower-case letters and they will be printed in a font called Clearview, the New York Daily News reported Thursday. The Federal Highway Administration said the new sign standards improve safety because they allow drivers to identify words more quickly, allowing them to swiftly bring their eyes back...

If you’re looking for a job right now, your prospects are terrible. There are six times as many Americans seeking work as there are job openings, and the average duration of unemployment — the time the average job-seeker has spent looking for work — is more than six months, the highest level since the 1930s. You might think, then, that doing something about the employment situation would be a top policy priority. But now that total financial collapse has been averted, all the urgency seems to have vanished from policy discussion, replaced by a strange passivity. There’s a pervasive sense...

MEXICO CITY - President Felipe Calderon launched a program Monday to create jobs for young Mexicans and curb the flow of millions of migrants to the United States. The program will give cash incentives to companies for hiring first-time job holders. Calderon, who took office in December, campaigned on promises to boost employment opportunities in Mexico, vowing to be the "Jobs President." A conservative who narrowly won the July election, Calderon is under pressure from a strong leftist opposition to alleviate poverty affecting half the country's citizens. While he has criticized U.S. immigration policies, such as a proposed border fence,...