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Days Before the Elections, Bush Announces New Job Training Program |
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After years of cutting job training funds and promoting trade deals that kill U.S. jobs, yesterday, with great fanfare, and just a little more than a week before an election where job security is a top issue on voters’ minds, the Bush administration announced a new eight-state job training initiative.
Several of the states, Michigan, Ohio, Missouri, Minnesota and Pennsylvania, are battleground states where Bush-backed candidates are in trouble. The announcement also came the same day President Bush was campaigning in Michigan—heart of the auto industry and home to thousands of laid-off industry workers.
Just a coincidence, right?
But, at best, by the U.S. Department of Labor’s own estimates, the new so-called Career Advancement Accounts (CAAs) will reach just 500 people in each of the eight states that have agreed to participate in the program, and those states have agreed to foot half of the bill.
In the five hotly contested battleground states, the new program will reach just 2,500 workers, but those states have seen more than 195,000 jobs disappear just due to NAFTA. The job losses, according to the AFL-CIO’s Facts and Stats website, are: Michigan, 63,148; Minnesota, 19,278; Missouri, 18,566; Pennsylvania, 44,173; and Ohio, 49,866.
Labor Secretary Elaine Chao touted the program as an “empowerment” experience for workers. While jobless workers are more concerned about finding their next job, Chao really said the following about the CAA program. (We are not making this up.)
Workers are empowered to take control of their own training experience.
Most likely though, workers would rather be empowered to pay the overdue mortgage or next car payment.
Chao also pointed out that Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri and Ohio plan to target workers laid off or facing layoffs in the auto industry. Capped at 500 workers per state, Chao didn’t note that more than 250,000 auto industry workers are expected to lose their jobs in the near future, according to most estimates. Other states taking part are Indiana, Pennsylvania and Wyoming.
The federal government’s share of cost is $24 million over the two-year program. With millions of workers already jobless and millions more on shaky job-security grounds, the $24 million amounts to “chump change” says Bruce Herman of the National Employment Law Project (NELP).
The new CAAs are capped at $3,000 a year per worker, which is less than a typical dislocated worker receives for training and re-employment assistance under the current Workforce Investment Act (WIA) or the Trade Adjustment Assistance program. It’s also about just half of the cost of one semester’s tuition at a Michigan community college. The grants can be renewed for just one year.
The Bush administration wants to replace current job training programs for dislocated workers, including WIA, with CAAs but Congress has blocked those attempts. Click here for a detailed analysis of the program by the Economic Policy Institute.
In another suspiciously-timed announcement, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said it would delay collecting any back taxes from Hurricane Katrina survivors and postpone sending notices to Gulf Coast people who failed to file returns until after the elections.
The New York Times today reported that IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson, who made the announcement, has close ties to the White House, serving as Bush’s deputy director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget—and his wife was the chief ethics lawyer (no giggling) in the Bush White House until February.
Former IRS Commissioner Jerome Kurtz, who served in the Carter administration said delaying tax enforcement actions around election times “is unthinkable.” Donald C. Alexander, who was IRS commissioner under Carter and Presidents Ford and Nixon, told the Times that he would never even consider delaying enforcement because of an election.
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