Free Republic

Last Thursday, President Obama proposed new federal jobs and job-training programs for youth and the long-term unemployed. The federal government has experimented with these programs for almost a half century. The record is one of failure and scandal. In 1962, Congress passed the Manpower Development and Training Act (MDTA) to provide training for workers who lost their jobs due to automation or other technological developments. Two years later, the General Accounting Office (GAO) discovered that any trainee in this program who held a job for a single day was counted as "permanently employed"—a statistical charade by the Department of Labor...

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...