6/08/2011

Job Training Not The Answer To Our Economic Malaise

I find it interesting that President Obama spent time touting the need for a better trained workforce in order to compete for manufacturing jobs in the future.

That sounds just great. Great. Yeah. The future. Uh-huh.

But what about the present?

What good will all that training do if there are no jobs to be had? It seems he's putting the cart before the horse, expecting more job training to be the answer to our economic woes.

The problem with our economy is not the major lack of workers needed to fill vacant jobs. It's that there are no jobs to be had in the first place. To put it in simpler terms, it's not a supply problem, but a demand problem. There is an ample supply of workers to fill jobs. There's just no demand for them by business.

To what can we attribute this lack of demand? President Obama.

His economic policies have been a disaster. They appear to be based upon wishful thinking rather than sound economic principles. For one thing one does not shepherd an economic economy by sucking so much capital out of the economy that there's less of it for investing to create new jobs. One does not foster economic recovery by laying more intrusive and draconian regulations on the engine of economic recovery, namely businesses large and small. One does not 'fix' the economy by making investment risky by constantly changing the rules, making it impossible for anyone to figure out whether investing is worth the risk or not (with the answer increasingly becoming “no”).

All job training will do at this point is make sure we have an increasingly well-trained workforce still looking for work where none exists.