America’s junior colleges would be put to work training students for high-tech, well-paying jobs under an $8 billion initiative proposed in the administration’s 2012 budget.
Allen County Community College may not benefit from the initiative. It has ventured into the high-tech training business before and had to give it up because not enough students enrolled to pay the freight.
On the other hand, Germany and other European countries have kept their unemployment rates low by training workers for new jobs when the old ones disappeared due to changes in industrial patterns. The key is cooperation between industries and vocational training schools. They must be partners. And, of course, the industries needing workers for jobs that didn’t exist before must be located near enough to training sites to make the cooperation practical.
To do a little dreaming, ACCC could offer to train high-tech widget makers in partnership with a start-up widget company located, say, in the now-vacant Haldex plant.
Iola’s current industries seem to be able to train their own workers from scratch.
The community colleges that would benefit from this initiative are in areas already blessed with growing industries in need of workers capable of absorbing a relatively high level of technical training. The goal is to train 2 million such workers because, it should be assumed, surveys show that many are needed and cannot now be found.
Creating 2 million good-paying jobs and helping new industries get established are admirable recession-fighting goals. But selling those slices of pie in the sky to an election-bound Republican House will be somewhere between monstrously difficult and absolutely impossible.
The budget proposal to spend $476 billion on transportation projects is 60 times more expensive but probably has a better chance to pass because every one of the 50 states has a transportation budget in need of more federal dollars. Congress will, to be sure, cut the appropriation down sharply. But any check from Washington will be appreciated — and will create jobs in every state doing useful work.
Because money is fungible, giving the states more highway funds will make it easier for them to fund their public schools and universities and meet their other budget needs. If Congress agrees the economy needs more stimulation, sending checks to the state highway departments should take top priority.
PRESIDENT OBAMA’S budget is also a political statement and will be treated as such in Congress. He is asking, again, for such wildly unreasonable things as higher tax rates on those who earn $1 million a year to bring them up to what Warren Buffett’s secretary pays, and for Congress to allow the George W. Bush tax cuts of 2001-03 to expire as the Congress that passed them said they should.
The president did ask for $360 billion in cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, but did not propose trimming back the entitlement programs as much as his own deficit reduction commission proposed.
The budget, which covers the year beginning Oct. 1, projects a $1.33 trillion deficit this year — the fourth straight year of deficits of more than $1 trillion — and doesn’t anticipate bringing the nation’s getting and spending into balance, ever. The projected deficit in 2018 is still $575 billion.
It is, to say it again, an election-year budget. It spends more than the country should be borrowing to spend. It doesn’t raise taxes high enough on a wide enough swath of the economy to make more than a nick in the deficit.
Maybe we’ll get serious in January.
