Of California’s 12.1 percent unemployed, not many of them are teachers. Teachers here, thanks to their powerful public employee union, are doing pretty good, pulling down well above average wages and excessive pension rights that taxpayers really cannot afford, which contribute mightily to our state government’s perpetual debt crisis, itself a huge drag on the economy in general. Yet of the unemployed in California, almost 35% are young people in the recent high school graduate age category who are without work. Of those, about half of young black males are unemployed in California – three years into Barrack Obama’s presidency. Over 21% of black Californians in general are unemployed. Where is their hope in Obama’s plan for a job? Well, they have very little hope under Obama.
The Obama national jobs plan outlined this week is pretty simple: hire more teachers. But of course unemployed young black men in California don’t have the college education to qualify for the necessary teaching credential. Oh, and Obama’s plan calls for continuing to pour more concrete in government road projects. However, unemployed young black men, being new to the workforce, don’t have the skills to get admitted into the construction trade unions that might benefit from more stimulus spending on road construction, let alone the seniority in the union to actually get hired to work on a project. Obama’s plan for small business is to offer more loan programs through the Small Business Administration. However, what small businesses need is tax relief incentives to do more hiring, not bureaucratic loan programs that take weeks to apply forandcomplete the application forms and even then are impossible to meet the qualification regulations. Not much hope there for any employment boost, including for black and Hispanic youth, where the unemployment problem is worst.
It is this dirth of a real jobs program that has prompted California Congresswoman Maxine Walters to call out Obama and say, “treat blacks like they were from Iowa!”, meaning, give them the same special attention that the presidential candidates are giving to the citizens of America’s earliest presidential primary state. Record unemployment levels in California call for attention to the unemployed across the board, not just black unemployed, but there is no denying that among black and Hispanic youth the problem is most acute. Walters and Obama’s problem, along with many leaders in the minority communities, is their lack of willingness to embrace new,targeted solutions in the minority communities, such as the “enterprise zones” called for by famous economist Dr. Arthur Laffer, which would eliminate job killing Federal and state regulations in designated urban areas to draw capital investment and new job growth. But more than one black economic writer has blasted the idea as “ghettoizing” and leading to creation of “sweatshops” instead of new jobs. Union rhetoric. So the stasis of ideas simply leads to new extensions of Federal and state unemployment compensation, leading to even more government debt, and undoubtedly sets a stage for more youth crime, leading to a host of other undesirable outcomes for the people affected, and for taxpayers.
Reaction on Capitol Hill to Obama’s new jobs plan has been to see it for what it is: just more politics. Obama is simply pandering to his public employee union supporters and giving himself an excuse on his dismal jobs performance when the Republican House of Representatives ultimately decides most of the plan is worthless. Regardless, even people who should be Obama’s core supporters, like California’s Maxine Walters, can see that his economic policies are not “creating jobs”. And the deeper analysis is that Obama’s policies are destroying wealth, and without wealth, there can be no money in the private sector to hire anybody, let alone youth unemployed.
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Read More at CA Political Review By James V. Lacy, California Political Review
