by oldedude on March 14, 2023 1:25 pm
Dan Quayle championed a jobs program called CETA in the 80's.
In a recent speech, Quayle asserted that the program had “trained 3.4 million disadvantaged workers.” But it is far from clear what or how much the program has achieved, according to several job training experts and a January, 1988, report by the Labor Department’s Office of Inspector General.
The study found that:
--The program’s “rates of retaining participants in jobs, increasing their earnings and reducing welfare dependency are not encouraging.”
--Almost half of the participants end up unemployed four months after training ends.
--JTPA “is not targeting hard-to-serve individuals.” Rather, it is targeting participants who are easy to place. Sixty percent of those placed are high school graduates.
--About 60% of the workers who received training would have been hired without it, according to employers interviewed by the Labor Department.
Findings such as these have prompted critics, such as Indiana University associate professor Mark Crouch, to call the program “corporate welfare.”
To be sure, JTPA has its champions, prime among them Robert T. Jones, assistant secretary of labor for employment and training. “I think the program is clearly succeeding,” he said in a telephone interview. “We have moved from 30-40% placement under CETA to 60-70% under JTPA.”
The Job Training Partnership Act was enacted in 1982 as a replacement for the frequently criticized Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA). The CETA program, at its peak, spent $9 billion annually, training many people who were ultimately put in short-term government jobs or “make-work” projects without lasting benefits to the recipients. The program also was scandal-ridden.
16 million people have signed up for the Affordable Care Act.
March 2020 marks the 10th anniversary of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, also known as ObamaCare. In its first decade, ObamaCare has failed to solve many of the health care problems it was supposed to address. Even worse, it has compounded many of the issues it was meant to fix — the law of unintended consequences in action.
First, then-candidate Barack Obama said his namesake act would “cut the cost of a typical family’s premiums by up to $2,500 a year.”
In reality, the opposite has occurred. According to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), “premiums have doubled for individual health insurance plans since 2013, the year before many of Obamacare’s regulations and mandates took effect.”
Even more shocking, HHS reports, “Average individual market premiums more than doubled from $2,784 per year in 2013 to $5,712 on Healthcare.gov in 2017—an increase of $2,928 or 105%.” Needless to say, ObamaCare has fallen woefully short in its grand ambition to slice health insurance premiums by $2,500 per year.
Second, ObamaCare supporters claimed it would drastically reduce the uninsured population. Unfortunately, this also has not happened. As of this writing, there are roughly 28 million Americans without health insurance. And the number of those without health insurance has increased in recent years. And now that the individual mandate (a dubious provision forcing Americans to purchase health insurance) has been repealed, this number is expected to rise even more.
I also don't consider socialized medicine the government has a right to look at your health records any time they want. The VA was already giving veterans' information to DOJ and BATFE (who have access to the records through a central database). Like I've said several times before, a janitor could not like you and turn the veteran in which would kick off a search of your house on a "hunch," which is prohibited under law and is a violation of the 4th and 6th amendments. This is the brainchild for the red flag laws that are being systematically overturned in courts throughout the US. For most people that work, their costs went up several hundred percent given the deductibles, and drug costs.
latimes.com
thehill.com
