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The 2011 Jobs Bill

Alas I’ve been too tied up to comment on much of anything lately. But for those of you who are waxing sympathetic to the “jobs bill” making its way out of the White House and into Congress, particularly because you want to make sure that states and localities get their fair share, and because you still have a twinge of hope that this time, yes this time, some good jobs will be created, I want to offer up yet another simple reminder of how things work on the ground.

This is how federal money gets shared with the states. To summarize, New York State intentionally keeps healthy people as “mentally disabled” and puts them in “Local Intensive Treatment Units.” That is a euphemism for a prison. And they do this just because Medicaid pays the state $4,556 per day in reimbursements, or 3x the cost of care provided at these facilities. And the reason to keep these funds coming and these people locked up? You guessed it – to save jobs! And sadly, these treatment centers seem to have made the formerly healthy patients mentally sick. But you know, this is just one little isolated incident. The other $450 billion will get spent wisely and to make good, healthy, well-paying jobs available to the down-trodden. Yup.

UPDATE: In this morning’s Wall Street Journal, James Bovard demonstrates just how effective actual job training programs have been. Here is one illustration:

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 to camouflage its lack of results. A decade after MDTA’s inception, GAO reported that it was failing to teach valuable job skills or place trainees in private jobs and was marred by an “overriding concern with filling available slots for a particular program,” regardless of what trainees actually needed.

Read the whole thing.

One Response to “The 2011 Jobs Bill”

  1. Speedmaster says:

    We could call #Obama’s jobs bill “No Union Member Left Behind” ( http://bit.ly/qkKWMU )

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