Free Republic

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. Obama told Congress on Thursday in a major speech on jobs that the state-run Georgia Work$ initiative, along with other measures, would help people unemployed for more than six months and he stressed that Republican leaders in Congress supported it.

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...

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...