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I was reading some of the pap you'll find in the papers these days that claims to have the solution for disasters, like the skyrocketing in the murder rate in Baltimore. That's the rate that suggests that you would be safer in northwestern Iraq than in some parts of Charm City.
Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who for the moment is the city's mayor, apparently believes that "job training" is critical to reversing the murder rate (hint -- reversing the anesthetizing of your police force might do a bit more, there, Steph). Surely others in the liberal camp agree with that. Let's train those guys in the streets, and they'll be productive citizens before you know it.
And gee, like all wonderful liberal thoughts, it sure sounds good. Of course, like all wonderful liberal thoughts, when you look at the actual application, and analyze data, and even try it out, it does sort of go south quickly as a usable concept.
Digression again -- I'm sure many of you have heard the story of the difference between a liberal and a conservative. If a guy is drowning 100 feet off a pier, the conservative will throw him a 50-foot rope and tell him to swim the other 50 feet, it will be good for him. The liberal, on the other hand, will buy a 300-foot rope with someone else's money, dump it in the water without looking to see if the drowning man even sees it, and immediately turn and walk away to do another good deed.
Now I try, I really try, to do some general "sniff test" thinking when I hear about a solution to a societal problem, but this one keeps failing. Forget whether there is even a logistical capability to provide "job training" to the unemployed, or how to administer it, or figure out where it's needed or, for that matter, what skills we're even talking about training on.
No, let's look at the numbers.
The "numbers" I refer to are the ones that make sense in this discussion. And, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, those fine civil servants with jobs guaranteed for life who tell us whatever the White House want them to tell us, here are some of them:
- The total USA labor force is about 226 million Americans.
- The U-6, or total unemployed, underemployed and "quit looking", is about 26 million Americans.
- The total number of illegals in the USA is about 11.5 million.
- Assuming the illegals' labor participation is close to ours, about 8.2 million are available to work.
- The number of available job openings in the USA is about 5 million.
So before we spend a penny training anyone for jobs, this is what I see here in Year 7 of the Great Obama Legacy Era. There are some 26 million Americans looking for (or needing) a job, most of whom without one at all, the rest inadequately employed and out looking for normal jobs -- or at least wanting one.
Now, I don't think you need to have taken calculus at MIT to know that works out to about five Americans seeking work, or better work, for every actual job opening. I'm not convinced that is necessarily worse than it has been in previous decades or other administrations, but it is surely rather high up in comparison to where that ratio has ever been.
Listen carefully again to where that ratio is. We have, depending on how you look at it, either too many people looking for work, or we have an economy not creating jobs quickly enough or in large enough numbers to absorb the people available to take them. You either have to create more jobs by firing up the economy, or ship 80% of the unemployed and underemployed to Canada or Madagascar or Mars, so they don't count in the Bureau of Labor Statistics figures.
What you don't need to do is create a better-educated class of unemployed person, as I described last week in responding to an absurd proposal from Sen. Bernie Sanders (Socialist-VT). I mean, that's all well and good, but if what we need is labor to work the oil fields in western North Dakota, because that's where many of those jobs are, it doesn't make a lot of sense to be training drug dealers on the streets of Baltimore who have no intention of relocating to the Peace Garden State.
Either way, let's take that a bit further. According to an earlier article in the Baltimore Sun that escapes me now, some 60% of the over-18 population in the worst neighborhood affected by the rioting and murders do not have a high-school education. So what exactly are we going to use as an underpinning for that job training (again -- we still don't know for what)? If the people haven't graduated high school, can they even read? Count? Communicate? Express themselves in cohesive sentences?
How do you train people to do some function that those with real job openings are looking for, when you don't know if they even have the capacity for critical thinking, the kind that is needed to do anything more than Lucy and Ethel in the candy factory?
Five people are looking for work and available, for every one job in the USA. Some are college-educated; some only have high-school diplomas. Some are unlucky; some have made mistakes with their job decisions. Some have specific experience in fields where there are jobs available. And some have done nothing in their lives but deal drugs in the streets.
If I'm hiring, and I have to hire a drug dealer (OK, just work with me and imagine I did), I would far rather hire the one who, without government intervention, straightened up, got a GED and took job-specific training on his own initiative. Granted, there probably are about zero of those in West Baltimore willing to do that, but you get the idea.
I'll make it simple. Before you train people, create the need. Otherwise you just tossed a 300-foot rope to a drowning man and briskly walked away.
Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."
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