Mountain Views News          Saturday, September 17, 2011

12

LEFT TURN/RIGHT TURN

 Mountain Views News Saturday, September 17, 2011

HOWARD Hays As I See It

GREG Welborn


JOBS, JOBS AND FEWER JOBS

 “A healthy 30-year-old 
young man ... decides, ‘You 
know what? I’m not going to 
spend $200, $300 a month 
on health insurance’ ... 
Something terrible happens. 
He goes into a coma ... He 
needs intensive care for six 
months. Who pays? ... Are 
you saying that society should 
just let him die?”

- moderator Wolf Blitzer at 
the Tea Party Republican 
Debate

 

“Yeah!” - response from audience

 

“That’s what freedom is all about.”

- response from Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX)

 

 Four nights earlier, Brian Williams began 
questioning Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) by noting, 
“Your state has executed 234 death row inmates, 
more than any other governor in modern 
times . . . “ The audience interrupted, breaking 
into applause, hoots and whistles. Williams 
continued, “Have you struggled to sleep at night 
with the idea that any one of those might have 
been innocent?”

 

 “I’ve never struggled with that at all”, replied 
the governor.

 

 (He apparently never struggled with the 2004 
execution of Cameron Willingham, convicted of 
murder by arson of his three children. Evidence 
included the twice-recanted testimony of a 
bipolar jailhouse informant, arson reports of 
discredited validity, and the defendant’s posters 
of Iron Maiden and Led Zeppelin - interpreted 
as signs of a “cultive-type” personality. As doubts 
grew over Willingham’s guilt, Perry refused to 
stay the execution. Later, when the Texas Forensic 
Science Commission found the investigation had 
been based on “flawed science”, Perry fired the 
commissioners.)

 

 Since Machiavelli, ruling elites have averted 
threats to their power by fostering division among 
those beneath them; encouraging those on the 
floor to fight amongst themselves for scraps fallen 
from the banquet table.

 

 In past decades, Republicans diverted attention 
from a vanishing middle-class and redistribution 
of wealth by focusing instead on race, gays, God 
and guns. Today, instead of attacking legislators 
who function as corporate assets rather than 
public servants, we attack each other; when it’s 
harder to feed our families, we attack the single 
mom getting food stamps; when insurance 
premiums are higher than mortgage payments, 
we go after public employees with health benefits; 
when a 401(k) is wiped out in the Wall Street 
meltdown, the enemy becomes the retired 
teacher living off a pension; when universities 
become unaffordable, the problem is the child 
of undocumented immigrants granted in-state 
tuition.

 

 When a factory shuts down with jobs shipped 
overseas, instead of attacking a lobbyist-written 
tax code allowing maximum profits for doing so, 
we blame unions fighting for decent wages and 
working conditions, and community activists 
demanding clean air and safe drinking water.

 

 A tradition of “E Pluribus, Unum” stretched 
from Benjamin Franklin’s volunteer fire 
departments and government postal service, 
through barn-raisings and church-buildings in 
pioneer communities, to President Bill Clinton’s 
declaration , “There is no ‘us’ and ‘them’, there 
is only ‘us’” at his first inaugural. Now there’s 
mocking derision towards references to the deaths 
of fellow Americans - to an extent surprising 
to Rep. Paul and Gov. Perry themselves, as they 
remarked following the debates.

 

 Legislators aren’t incapable of helping those 
who need it. House Majority Leader Eric 
Cantor (R-VA) voted for over $120 billion in 
construction and repair for schools, bridges, 
roads and other infrastructure; funding not “paid 
for”, but financed through deficit spending.

 

 That $120 billion, however, was for Iraq and 
Afghanistan. Rep. Cantor opposes President 
Obama’s proposal in his jobs bill to spend $30 
billion rebuilding schools here at home, creating 
an estimated 300,000 new jobs - with funding 
that’s paid for.

 

 Gov. Perry is not totally averse to investment 
in worthy projects. In answering a question 
at Monday’s debate, he expressed the need to 
“continue to help them build the infrastructure 
that they need, whether it’s schools for young 
women like yourself, or otherwise.” That was for 
Afghanistan. Gov. Perry condemned President 
Obama’s proposals to invest in similar projects 
and put people to work here in America.

 

 On the day Republicans on stage stood 
silently as their audience shouted approval for 
letting Wolf Blitzer’s hypothetical American die, 
Republicans in the Senate used their minority 
filibuster to block $7 billion in aid from going 
to those victimized by Hurricane Irene, flooding 
along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and 
last Spring’s tornados in Joplin and elsewhere in 
the South and Midwest.

 

 Pitting Americans against each other, rather 
than working together to solve problems, is not 
just a diversionary tactic; maintaining frustration 
and misery is an end in itself. Opposition to 
President Obama’s jobs bill is not based on 
doubts that it would work, but on fears that it 
will. As a senior House Republican aide was 
quoted in Politico, “Obama is on the ropes; why 
do we appear ready to hand him a win?” The 
goal remains as Senate Republican Leader Mitch 
McConnell (R-KY) put it a year ago, “The single 
most important thing we want to achieve is for 
President Obama to be a one-term president.”

 Two years ago, former Rep. Alan Grayson (R-
FL) was chastised for declaring on the House 
floor, “The Republicans want you to die quickly 
if you get sick.” When asked if the audience at 
Monday’s debate validated his remark, Grayson 
observed, “It’s the same impulse that led people 
in the Coliseum to cheer when the lions ate the 
Christians. And that seems to be where we are 
heading -- bread and circuses, without the bread. 
The world that Hobbes wrote about -- ‘the war of 
all against all’.”

 

 Republicans will fight to kill President Obama’s 
jobs bill over threats to allowable depreciation on 
corporate jets. The rest of us will be encouraged 
to fight amongst ourselves over remaining scraps 
of healthcare, disaster relief and help for the 
neediest among us. And those who shout most 
loudly for death from a Tea Party audience will be 
most likely to go out and proclaim us a “Christian 
Nation”.


The President is stumping the country to build 
support for yet another “jobs programs”, trying 
to position it as a new and brilliant solution to the 
unemployment problem. Unfortunately for him, 
there’s not much new, or even brilliant, in this 
program. The federal government has a long and 
storied history with various jobs programs, and 
that history is one of almost universal failure.

On the surface, it might seem like a good idea 
for the government to generate jobs for people and 
to train them to take on better jobs. So ingrained 
is this belief that it still has some traction after 
50+ years of failure. In 1962, Congress passed the 
Manpower Development and Training Act. Its 
goal was to train those who had lost their jobs. 
After 10 years, the Government Accounting 
Office audit of the program indicated that it failed 
to teach meaningful job skills or place people in 
private jobs. The program was primarily run 
as a means of manipulating the unemployment 
statistics at the time.

Congress came back in 1973 with the 
Comprehensive Employment and Training Act. 
This program focused on putting people to work 
in whatever convoluted way possible, again just 
to get them off the unemployment lines. Huge 
amounts of money were spent “employing 
people” to go door to door recruiting families 
to join the food stamp program or to take art 
“retraining” classes to learn how to paint nudes. 
An investigation of the program in 1979 found it 
to be “almost worthless in terms of learning what 
works”.

Never to be discouraged by failure, Congress 
created yet another jobs program: the 1982 
Job Training Partnership Act. This one really 
succeeded in failing. The Department of Labor’s 
Inspector General found that participants in 
this program were twice as likely to rely on food 
stamps after being in the program than they 
were before. The primary reason for this was 
that much of the training was on how to apply 
for government benefits, rather than on how to 
keep a job. Another review of the program in 
1993 showed that participation in the program 
“actually reduced the earnings of male out-of-
school youths”. Participants earned on average 
10% less than similar aged non-participants.

Once again, Congress tried to tweak a losing 
formula to find some glimmer of justification 
for the billions it was spending. In 1998, they 
delivered to the nation The Workforce Investment 
Act. This time, Congress mandated an evaluation 
of the program’s success be conducted by no later 
than 2005 in order to determine what corrective 
actions might be needed to insure the attainment 
of the program’s long term goals. The Labor 
Department informed Congress that it wouldn’t 
be able to complete such an evaluation until 2015, 
and nobody in Congress seemed to object.

As we can see, government attempts to employ 
and train the unemployed have rarely succeeded 
over what amounts to an extended history of 
efforts to work such magic. The reasons for the 
consistent failure aren’t that hard to fathom. In 
fact, the Government Accounting Office issued a 
warning way back in 1969 telling Congress and the 
nation that participants 
in these programs often 
“regressed in their 
conception of what 
should reasonably be 
required in return for 
wages paid”. Ten years 
later, the GAO added the 
observation that most 
participants were “exposed to a worksite where 
good work habits were not learned or reinforced”. 

All of these programs are at their heart 
political creations. Those who are charged with 
their implementation and management are 
focused more on impacting the unemployment 
numbers of the day than on really helping people 
train for, land and retain a job. Add to this the 
typical Liberal obsession with “rights” instead of 
“responsibilities” and you have a perfect formula 
for failure. As a result, any job or training class 
is seen as an improvement, even if it’s training 
people ineffectively or for jobs that aren’t really 
in large supply. The basic problem is that the 
incentives in a government program can never 
be the same as they are in a private program. 
Government programs always have a politically 
motivated goal: get the statistical measure of 
unemployment down. It doesn’t matter to them 
whether or not someone is in a long-term or 
high-value job – just that they are no longer part 
of the measured unemployed.

Private training programs, which are either 
managed by employers or by other vendors 
who have to meet employers’ needs or go 
out of business themselves – have direct and 
uncompromising incentives to succeed. If the 
Acme Manufacturing Company is going to 
spend money in a training program, you can 
be sure that it will train people for real, full-
time job openings it has and that the program is 
successful in actually training people for those 
jobs. If not, the program is terminated in a 
matter of months, as opposed to the decades that 
unsuccessful government programs continue 
to function. The same holds true for training 
programs run by private vendors. If they can’t 
deliver a successfully trained person for a real 
job need in industry, then they don’t get paid. 
The operators of these programs don’t continue 
losing programs for long either.

Once again, President Obama is turning to 
government to solve a problem that can’t be 
successfully addressed by anyone other than 
private employers. He seems oblivious to the 
fact that what he calls “new” has a long history of 
failure. Hopefully, this time, Congress will resist 
the urge to pile failure upon failure and instead 
will actually address the key tax and regulatory 
hurdles which are really stifling employment and 
growth in this country.

About the author: Gregory J. Welborn is a 
freelance writer and has spoken to several civic 
and religious organizations on cultural and moral 
issues. He lives in Arcadia with his wife and 3 
children and is active in the community. He can 
be reached at gregwelborn@earthlink.net.

Re: Green, Green Grass of Joblessness

 August 27, 2011

Is Greg Welborn Kidding? The worst jobless 
years were under President Reagan. It used to 
be that facts were facts and opinions were how 
facts were interpreted. Apparently facts don’t 
matter anymore. Below are the Bureau of Labor 
Statistics unemployment rates for September 
1982 through June 1983. Pass these FACTS 
along to Greg with a message from me. 

FACTS DO MATTER! 

1982-09-01 10.1

1982-10-01 10.4

1982-11-01 10.8

1982-12-01 10.8

1983-01-01 10.4

1983-02-01 10.4

1983-03-01 10.3

1983-04-01 10.2

1983-05-01 10.1

1983-06-01 10.1 

Signed, HH Sierra Madre

 


LETTER TO THE EDITOR


RICH Johnson

Shortest Books Ever Written

Before I get to the list of 
quality books, I want to 
promote my 1960s- 1970s 
rock and roll band, JJ 
Jukebox. We have added 
a Saturday, October 1st, to 
perform a dinner show at Corfu Restaurant. 
The time is 6:30 – 9:00. We perform music by 
the Beatles, Van Morrison, Roy Orbison and 
more. We’re even adding Jefferson Airplane 
and Nicolette Larson tunes thanks to our 
guest vocalist Amy Kafkaloff. So call Corfu at 
(626) 355-5993 and make reservations. The 
Friday night show is sold out and Saturday 
night just might sell out too. So, come join us 
for great Mediterranean food and fun music. 
(There is no cover charge. The great folks at 
Corfu only ask you spend at least $10 per 
person on food, drinks, or dessert.)

Now the greatest (and shortest) books ever 
written. There were so many to choose from. 
I’ll give you my personal favorites:

A Millennium of German Humor

A Collection of Sonatas for Banjo

A Foreigner’s Guide to Camping in Florida

The Amish Phone Book

Career Opportunities for History Majors

Al Gore: The Wild Years

An Engineer’s Guide to Fashion

French Hospitality

How Paperclips Work

Scotch Tape for Dummies

Mike Tyson’s Guide to Dating Etiquette

Different Ways to Spell Bob

Train Your Cat

My Years in Baseball, by Michael Jordan

The Complete Cookbook of Toast

Scuba Divers of Tibet

Gourmet British Restaurants

The “Gourmet British Restaurants” reminds 
me of another fun fictional fact. What’s the 
difference between heaven and hell (If you 
are familiar with the particular peculiarities 
of European countries you will appreciate 
this):

In Heaven:

The Germans organized it

The Swiss run it

The French cook for it

The British are the police

And the Italians are the lovers

In Hell:

The French organized it

The Italians run it

The British cook for it

The Germans are the police

And the Swiss are the lovers.

Finally, if you haven’t come to the Sierra 
Madre Playhouse on a Saturday morning at 
11:00 am to see “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, 
you are missing two great shows. First, these 
Fairy Tale Theatre productions are designed 
for kids, and I find watching the young kids 
enjoying the hour long production to be very 
heartwarming entertainment. Second, the 
show itself is great fun. Derek Coleman, who 
plays the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, is a talented 
actor AND magician. The other actors are 
superb: Helen Frederick as the Hare, Lynda 
Rohrbacher as the Good Witch, Joyce Sindel 
as the Bad Witch, Ron Johnston as the 
Dragon, Barry Schwam as the Sly Fox, and 
Lindsay Hopper as the Damsel in Distress. 
FINAL PERFORMANCE is Saturday, 
September 24 at 11:00 at the Sierra Madre 
Playhouse. Call 355-4318 for reservations.


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