Can the US Create Hundreds of Thousands of Jobs With a Civilian Climate Corps? (go.com) 129
ABC News reports:
Inspired by the New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps, President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats are pushing for a modern counterpart: a Civilian Climate Corps that would create hundreds of thousands of jobs building trails, restoring streams and helping prevent catastrophic wildfires. Building on Biden's oft-repeated comment that when he thinks of climate change, he thinks of jobs, the White House says the multibillion-dollar program would address both priorities as young adults find work installing solar panels, planting trees, digging irrigation ditches and boosting outdoor recreation...
Colorado Public Radio reports that there's already a new Colorado Climate Corps, funded by a $1.7 million federal grant, that will place 240 members of America's federally-funded national service program "AmeriCorps" into 55 counties across Colorado "to protect public lands and help low-income communities brace for the climate crisis."
And now supporters of the larger federal program "envision climate corps workers installing solar panels, weatherizing buildings and providing water and other supplies during heat waves and storms," reports the New York Times: A new climate corps would help address the growing threat of wildfires in Idaho, according to Jay Satz, senior director for partnerships and innovation at the Northwest Youth Corps and Idaho Conservation Corps. Mr. Satz said his group doesn't have the funding or the staff to meet that need, which includes thinning out dead trees, replanting new trees and rehabilitating land hit by fires.
Colorado Public Radio reports that there's already a new Colorado Climate Corps, funded by a $1.7 million federal grant, that will place 240 members of America's federally-funded national service program "AmeriCorps" into 55 counties across Colorado "to protect public lands and help low-income communities brace for the climate crisis."
And now supporters of the larger federal program "envision climate corps workers installing solar panels, weatherizing buildings and providing water and other supplies during heat waves and storms," reports the New York Times: A new climate corps would help address the growing threat of wildfires in Idaho, according to Jay Satz, senior director for partnerships and innovation at the Northwest Youth Corps and Idaho Conservation Corps. Mr. Satz said his group doesn't have the funding or the staff to meet that need, which includes thinning out dead trees, replanting new trees and rehabilitating land hit by fires.
Yes (Score:4, Informative)
For one Betterage doesn't hold up.
The real question is if the US will actually do it. I imagine to many it sounds a bit too socialist.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
It would help socially disadvantaged, create jobs in areas where jobs are rare and most of all do something lasting for the environment.
That's so anti-capitalist!
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
It depends. If these are government make-work jobs, I'm not sure how much good they'll do in the long run. We don't have a lot of extra money to throw around. The federal government keeps going further and further into debt, with no end in sight. No one wants to think about what might eventually happen if that continues indefinitely, aside from those who actually believe that state of affairs can go on without serious financial repercussions. That's another "inconvenient truth" many people don't want to face.
If they can be a bit more self-sustaining, paid for by legitimate needs (like companies who need solar panels installed), then it could be beneficial. I have no objection to that.
You'll forgive my suspicion, however, that this will end up just being more pork barrel kickbacks that go to friends of the administration or high ranking Congress members, with only a few actual jobs created. I'd love to be proven wrong. We all know how "shovel-ready jobs" went. Fool me once, etc.
Re:Yes (Score:4, Insightful)
It depends. If these are government make-work jobs, I'm not sure how much good they'll do in the long run. We don't have a lot of extra money to throw around.
There is zero "extra money" to throw around. We're already 23 Trillion in debt, growing at a rate of half a trillion every year.
Re: Yes (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
These workers will not increase the amount of goods and services we can use.
I think this is a bit simplistic. We shouldn't think about those workers as being taken out of the goods and production workforce - because that's not the point. Instead, climate change prevention should be considered a form of infrastructure and civil work - similar for example to the flood protection/ecosystem restoration work done by the Army Corps of Engineers. Even if those workers won't create goods themselves, their work will enable communities and businesses to flourish and produce those goods and s
Yes... but (Score:2)
I think this is a bit simplistic. We shouldn't think about those workers as being taken out of the goods and production workforce - because that's not the point. Instead, climate change prevention should be considered a form of infrastructure and civil work - similar for example to the flood protection/ecosystem restoration work done by the Army Corps of Engineers. Even if those workers won't create goods themselves, their work will enable communities and businesses to flourish and produce those goods and services you're concerned about.
Interesting.
I like the idea, but... it really seems to me that "hundreds of thousands" of minimum-wage workers really is not the way to combat climate change. You need energy storage systems and solar array fields and wind power and high-voltage transmission lines to moderate variable power and more-efficient transportation and methods to produce fertilizer that are not energy intensive, and, yes, even next-generation nuclear plants.
None of this is to be done with a corps of a hundred thousand minimum wag
Re: (Score:2)
Also, if they have jobs they will have money and they can spend it on stuff, keeping businesses alive.
Re: (Score:1)
Get a damn clue!
We're already 23 Trillion in debt, growing at a rate of half a trillion every year.
You are in dept amoung yourself. The "state" is in dept by the rich part of the citizens.
Who the funk cares about that? Unless you want to become communist and tell the rich to fuck off?
Re: (Score:3)
Do remember that every dollar created for this program will increase the money supply without bothering with all that "making something to sell" part.
Which translates, more or less, to higher prices for everyone for everything.
Which translates , more or less, as "everyone will be a bit poorer.
Do try to keep in mind that switching from coal, oil, and gas to solar, wind, and nuclear doesn't mean "let's recruit a bunch of guys from the ghettos of NYC to do this". Rather, it means "let's give a metric fuckt
Re: (Score:2)
Jobs for minimum-wage workers puts more money in the hands of the low-income people, which turns out to be very effective in improving the economy. Improving the economy ends up increasing the amount of tax money coming in, even without raising tax rates.
Yes, it sounds like a shell game, but economics is sometimes counterintuitive. The trick is having the civilian corps do things that are actually useful. The WPA, long ago, actually did; in fact
Moneys (Score:3)
There is a stupid amount of extra money in the economy, it is paid to the super-rich who spend a bit of it on luxury goods, invest some of it into the wall street casinos where it sails over most everyone's heads, and drop the majority of it into economic oubliettes such as cash holdings and overseas bank accounts, where it is simply parked out of play instead of circulating among people who would generate more economic activity by spending it.
My favorite factoid to throw around. You can take all the wealth of all the billionaires in the US. All the stock, cash, houses, cars, bonds, and liquid assets stashed away in tax havens. Take every penny, and give it to federal, local and state governments. It would last about half a year. Then you'd run out of their money.
Let's say the fed was extra greedy and kept it all to themselves. It would run the federal government for, maybe, three years.
Then what?
The government could double how much it was taking
Re: (Score:2)
First of all billionaires are a small subset of the super-rich. Next, try looking at it another way: How would workers' lives be affected by a tax holiday lasting as long as X amount of wealth would fund all levels of government? Or what if instead of simply using it to fund the status quo, it were used to actually do something new and different that is currently unaffordable?
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
The USA would see less money leaving to foreign nations if the taxes were lowered. This money goes where people will see less of it taken by the government. An easy fix is to lower taxes. Democrats admitted to seeing this happen when they sent representatives to Europe to convince them to raise their taxes. It would help if Democrats cared about the Laffer curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Arthur Laffer observed that there is a curve on which tax rates define revenue. At 0% and 100% tax rate income is zero. There is a point in the middle where tax income is highest, and if people in government were interested in paying down debt and funding social programs they'd work to find this optimal tax rate. Instead we have Democrats working to only raise the tax rate, and being quite open that they would raise tax rates even if that means lower income for the government. It upsets them that there are people that make more money than others. They aren't trying to lift the poor out of poverty, they want to drag the wealthy down.
The poor will always be with us. There is no means by which to eliminate poverty, so nobody should even try. Instead try to minimize it. Or merely maximize freedom, as that's what the federal government was created to do. Raising the minimum wage is not going to lift people out of poverty, it's going to price people out of work or devalue the dollar. Not every job is supposed to be for a "living wage". There will be teens looking for their first job, living at home, that need some on the job training. There will be the semi-retired that just want some supplemental income and keep them occupied for a few hours per week. There's people with mental or physical disabilities that can't support themselves but can still help out with the bills while living with friends or relatives that aid in their care.
You can rob the wealthy blind to pay for this or that, but then what happens? You burned up the capital these people had to invest in building businesses. That is a path to universal poverty. But then I guess if everyone is homeless and jobless then nobody is.
If the Democrats were interested in mitigating global warming then they'd look to find energy sources with the highest return on investment and lowest CO2 emissions then do what they can to support those. Those would be onshore wind, geothermal, hydro, and nuclear fission. Their plans on putting money into solar power shows just how unserious they are in improving the economy and lowering CO2 emissions.
If misapplication of resources concerns you then Democrats putting government funds into solar power should be quite upsetting.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The USA would see less money leaving to foreign nations if the taxes were lowered. This money goes where people will see less of it taken by the government. An easy fix is to lower taxes. Democrats admitted to seeing this happen when they sent representatives to Europe to convince them to raise their taxes.
Keeping taxes in the country by lowering them to beat the tax havens at their own game is a destructive race to the bottom, in the end everyone loses except wealthy tax-dodgers. Global minimum tax rates are a good way to put an end to it.
It would help if Democrats cared about the Laffer curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ [wikipedia.org]... [wikipedia.org]
Arthur Laffer observed that there is a curve on which tax rates define revenue. At 0% and 100% tax rate income is zero. There is a point in the middle where tax income is highest, and if people in government were interested in paying down debt and funding social programs they'd work to find this optimal tax rate. Instead we have Democrats working to only raise the tax rate, and being quite open that they would raise tax rates even if that means lower income for the government. It upsets them that there are people that make more money than others. They aren't trying to lift the poor out of poverty, they want to drag the wealthy down.
Treating the Laffer curve as a well-established rule of economics is almost as terrible a mistake as treating the Pareto "principle" (also an observation) as some kind of underlying law of the universe. Even if increasing tax rates beyond a certain point costs money (unlike
Re:Yes (Score:4, Informative)
Keeping taxes in the country by lowering them to beat the tax havens at their own game is a destructive race to the bottom, in the end everyone loses except wealthy tax-dodgers. Global minimum tax rates are a good way to put an end to it.
That's already described by the Laffer curve. For one thing it costs money to export money and so people will take this into account to lowering their tax burden. A government cannot lower their rates to zero as that means making nothing, so it may be a race to the bottom but it's to finding that spot on the Laffer curve where they get the most revenue from discouraging wage earners exporting their income.. They can tax something other than income, like property, imports and exports, sales, and others.
Global minimum tax rates are a terrible way to put an end to this because it takes only one nation to not agree to put an end to the practice.
Teens doing jobs that adults can do should be paid like any adult would, otherwise there is some ageism at play.
Did I say only teens would be paid this wage? No. I pointed out that a teen may not be as skilled as an adult and so is not likely to justify getting a higher wage. The argument for paying a "livable wage" to everyone is nonsense because not all workers produce enough value for a "livable wage" from their employer, and most often these people are less experienced.
Most jurisdictions already have special labor regulations for people with mental and physical disabilities, such jobs don't need to be accounted for in minimum wage laws in the first place - although in some jurisdictions these alternate employment conditions have become exploitative as well.
If every job requires people be paid a "livable wage" then the inexperienced, physically disabled, elderly, and more will simply be unemployed, unemployable, and so be a burden on their communities than be able to pay part of their way in the costs to pay for their care. This creates more poverty, not reduces it.
Solar power has CO2 emissions and an ROI in the same ballpark as onshore wind, and attracts far less NIMBY opposition than wind so is much easier to build. I don't know where you're getting these figures about solar power from that cause you to think it's a terrible idea. Hopefully nothing relating to the solar panels used on satellites.
I get it from pages like those below that aggregate a number of sources. I'll post these and get idiots that claim that "a blog is not a source" or "that's a biased website". They cite their sources, and they are not "just some blogger", they are governments, universities, and such.
https://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/... [blogspot.com]
https://www.powermag.com/iea-n... [powermag.com]
https://world-nuclear.org/info... [world-nuclear.org]
https://www.iea.org/reports/pr... [iea.org]
http://www.withouthotair.com/C... [withouthotair.com]
http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co... [roadmaptonowhere.com]
There may be nations where solar power on the grid makes sense as part of a national energy policy, these nations are few. Solar power used off the grid is a different matter, and I expect solar power use off the grid to be wise choices for many. On the grid there's better options for lowering CO2, options with lower costs and greater reliability. If you have sources that can show solar power in a better light then I'd like to see them. I expect you or someone else to reply with plenty of words but no data. That's what always happens, words, often insults, but no data.
Re: (Score:2)
We don't have a lot of extra money to throw around.
You have.
The bombs you dropped the last 20 years on various places on the planet - including wedding parties - show that.
that this will end up just being more pork barrel kickbacks that go to friends of the administration or high ranking Congress members
Does not really matter if it leads to solar power and trees instead of bombs on brown children and wedding party guests.
Re: (Score:3)
The cool thing about saying "At least X is better than bombing children" is that it can be used to justify absolutely anything.
Should we build more brown coal power plants and dump the toxic ash into the Mississippi River?
Sure, because that is better than bombing kids.
Re: (Score:2)
You're so busy with your "schnaa schnaa" nose in the air routine, you forgot that moralizing works better if you yourself do something to achieve the moral high ground.
Here, you're just saying, "Well, golly, war is messy, war is hell, therefore just let ISIS take over my neighborhood and behead half the people."
Re: (Score:2)
Dear too-lazy-to-actually-look,
Try looking at wikipedia about the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930's under FDR. "Useless"? I've been, and slept in, cabins built by the CCC in state and federal parks. And it gave a job history for young people who had *nothing* before. And a lot of their pay was sent to their parents.
Gee, that would be terrible, giving money to folks who might be living in their cars otherwise.
Re: Yes (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Anything left of Genghis Khan sounds socialist to some people. To be honest, some of the most conservative people I know are also proud of the projects built by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the depression. They don't mind federal stuff, as long as it's not by a guy who's opposed to their guy.
You're confusing conservatives (Score:4, Insightful)
Based on my posting history most people would call me a flaming liberal but I'm actually a conservative. I'm not looking to reform our entire civilization I'm looking to stabilize it. But by casting me as the radical and folks who want to make us all work in the gig economy ala neo feudalism you can attract support from people who are just afraid of change because they're living paycheck to paycheck
Re: (Score:2)
"Based on my posting history most people would call me a flaming liberal but I'm actually a conservative."
Because you're old, like your uid suggests.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Based on my posting history most people would call me a flaming liberal
What? When someone says "flaming liberals of /.", you seem to be maybe in the first quartile of the scale or something like that.
That's because a great deal of time and money (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Radical and reactionary are terms about how people do things. Radical is often about taking extreme action before the trigger is there, reactionary is taking the extreme action after the trigger. Neither has any inherent left vs right usually. Reactionary tends to get applied to the hard line conservatives more, as they are reactionary against change, whereas radical gets applied to extreme liberals more as they radically want to make change. Those more moderate liberals and conservatives don't get the
Radical means favoring drastic reform (Score:3)
"It's a common mistake because the right wing doesn't want people to think of them as right-wing because well, their policies are radical and not very popular."
You really have things screwed up in your mind and in your thinking. A first year civics course teaches that... Radical == Leftists and Reactionary == Right
If your first year civics course you should demand your money back from the community college that taught the course.
Radical is defined as "thoroughgoing or extreme, especially as regards change from accepted or traditional forms: a radical change in the policy of a company;
favoring drastic political, economic, or social reforms."
You can have radical fundamentalism, which is radical right. You can be radical in any direction, left, right, or wacky.
Re:Yes (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
The WPA was a depression era USA, Federal Government program that actually built "things" -- roads, bridges, building, etc. Many of which are still in use today.
What did the CCC built? (I don't remember what my middle-school teacher, who worked for the CCC, told us was the difference with the WPA.)
Re: (Score:2)
Both actually, WPA and CCC both build stuff during the depression. CCC did more stuff in national parks and forests, including some roads.
Re: Yes (Score:2)
Boosting outdoor recreation...
Just what we need, more people starting fires, more trails and structures to defend and interfere with fire lines. Maybe a better idea would be to invest in fixing power distribution lines, tear down housing that was built in fire prone areas, invest in desalination plants, and relocate people away from deserts and drought prone regions.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't forget flood plains like New Orleans in the relocation plans.
Re: (Score:2)
That's the problem, about 30% of the population will see it as plot to end or start something, and throw political fits.
Re: (Score:2)
First off, all jobs are make-work jobs whether created by a corporation or a government. Second, as Noam Chomsky and others point out, jobs are pretty much wage slavery because you have no freedoms, no autonomy, have to follow every corporate rule. You sign away all your freedoms to get a paycheck, often a meager pay check. A civilian climate corps would not only be useful in converting the US to a green-smart grid, where power distribution and storage would be non-localized, but they would also be extremel
Re: (Score:2)
I'm Europe we have rights at work, so it's not really like slavery.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, I was talking about neoliberal (which means paleoconservative actually) America, where corporations have more rights than people. Sorry about that, I should have been more specific.
Re: (Score:3)
Communism, Socialism, Fascism, all pretty much the same, but from different starting points.
There's work to do (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
You just outlined a major problem with Leftist governments!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
AmeriCorps [wikipedia.org] members, who are volunteers
I'll bet that Chester Spellman [federalpay.org] doesn't work for free.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You can RTFS like everyone else; I believe in you.
At least somebody believes in him. I suspect he has a write-only interface.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Nobody weeps for me in my times of great befuddlement. Thank goodness.
Though if I sit re-watch the same physics lecture every day for 3 weeks, my wife tells me I'm really smart. I'm not sure I follow that logic, but it's still nice of her.
Re: (Score:2)
And where would you suggest that that wealth and freedom would come from if you automate away their jobs?
Re: (Score:2)
And where would you suggest that that wealth and freedom would come from if you automate away their jobs?
We automated away a lot of work over the centuries and yet people found things to do. What will keep people employed is the fact that humans are very social and want to interact with others. I may not need an agent at the airport to buy my ticket and choose my seat but it makes the process more pleasant and efficient if there's someone at the computer to ask the right questions and push the right buttons. Could this be automated away? Perhaps. What military forces around discovered is that when things
Re: (Score:2)
I would have loved to answer, but apparently no matter what I write, it looks like "too much of ascii art".
Maybe it's lacking swastikas.
Such a program competes with unemployment (Score:1, Insightful)
A large portion of the economic problem is that people are finding it much easier to accept unemployment payments than to work. The only incentive for such people to move to a government work program would be if unemployment payments go back to where they were pre-COVID.
However, the same people proposing this government work program are the ones pushing the "enhanced" unemployment, so it won't go away. Assuming it passes, in a year the complaint will be that they need to increase it, because there aren't en
Re:Such a program competes with unemployment (Score:5, Informative)
A large portion of the economic problem is that people are finding it much easier to accept unemployment payments than to work.
False [cnbc.com] and more false [nytimes.com]. Removing unemployment payments did not force people to find jobs. As been mentioned here and commented even more so, people are not rushing out to fill all those open jobs employers say they have,
Re: (Score:2)
A survey released in July says that cutting off federal enhancements less than a month earlier didn't get people to go back to looking for jobs. Even when the benefits were cut off, it would have taken a month for recipients to notice, because of delays in the money pipeline.
Not sure what the NYT link says, due to the paywall.
Anecdotally, one of my nephews decided that he made more money sitting on his ass during COVID than he did working for $20+ per hour as a mechanic. Working, he was earning $40K/year be
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure what the NYT link says, due to the paywall.
There is no paywall. You're just lazy.
Re: (Score:3)
Maybe the crime was in the government incentivizing this?
If I leave my truck parked, unlocked and with the keys in the ignition, knowing that it would be stolen and I could collect on insurance then is that not fraud on my part? The politicians know that if they leave money out for people to take where they'd make more sitting on their ass than take a job, that means they are a party to the crime. The politicians know people will do this, and they expect people to do this. It serves them to do this becau
Re: (Score:3)
Places like Denmark where the unemployment benefits were quite generous even before COVID also have a high level of employment.
Turns out very few people are content to live that way, when they can gain by being employed.
So if that is really what is happening in the US then the problem is probably that wages are too low. Sure enough employers are finding that offering decent money gets applicants.
Re: (Score:2)
Who would have thought that paying people not to work would result in people not working?
What we need are payments that are not conditional on being unemployed. Call it an "unconditional basic income" or "UBI". You'll have just enough to survive, but if you want any more than that, you'll have to work for it.
And with that in place, there would no longer be a need for a minimum wa
This is patently falls (Score:2)
The main issue appears to be a lack of affordable child care. There were a lot of people in the job market or effectively working for free or for very very little after factoring in the cost of child care and the cost of going to work.
The energy expenditure
Re: (Score:2)
From watching my kids trying to find work, it is also that the companies are being why too selective. It shouldn't be hard to get a job in fast food or sales, but it seems near impossible to even get a call back for an interview.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, at least 4 of the people with MOD points that try to zap my messages have used them to erase the "insightful" and "interesting" mod points my post had half a day ago. I wonder how many they have left?
The subject of the story is whether or not the government can "create" a lot of jobs. Yes, they can issue paperwork describing work, define hiring rules and purposes, and allocate billions of dollars to making it happen. Like any government project, it will have "hiring incentives" to "fix discrimination"
Only if the job creators let us (Score:5, Insightful)
You can bet every CEO in the country is thinking about the effect that having millions of good-paying jobs would have on the wages they have to pay. From the lowest Walmart or Amazon employee to your six-figure slashdot poster an increase in the supply of jobs would mean an increase in the wages employers would have to pay. That's just how supply and demand works. As a CEO a large part of your job is keeping costs down and labor is a large part of your costs.
This is kind of the problem the job Creator narrative. More often their job destroyers because they don't want to have to compete for employees.
Re: (Score:2)
now that its over i got people hitting me up talking 165k for cool kubernetes but for a boring corporate sector and im thinking to myself id rather work for 15$ an hour doing hydroponics. the climate corps is perfect for me. get outside, get workout, get some lunch money and have lots of time outside of work to keep working on my inventions or just keep improving my hydroponics and robotics ski
Re: (Score:2)
And I don't know about anyone else here, but I sure as hell don't make six figures.
We have millions of job openings now (Score:3)
This is not the great depression, we have millions of job openings right now.
There is no reason to be discussing a government program like this under these conditions.
Re: (Score:1)
This is not the great depression, we have millions of job openings right now. There is no reason to be discussing a government program like this under these conditions.
And the reason is that we are paying people not to work.
33% of Americans are in the gig economy (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
this religion you pray to is so myopic that they will pay you all the money in the world but can understand allowing your to work 3 days a week so you can have more free time to work on your inventions and your real plan.
this is called the hamster wheel and you love it.
but theres alot of people that think it sucks and have the guts to do something about.
Re: (Score:2)
But those jobs are not in the areas the government program is aiming for.
And if there are indeed millions of job openings (which I doubt): why is no one taking those jobs?
Labor shortage will get worse (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
now that its over i got people hitting me up talking 165k for cool kubernetes but for a boring corporate sector and im thinking to myself id rather work for 15$ an hour doing hydroponics. the climate corps is perfect for me. get outside, get workout, get some lunch money and have lots of time outside of work to keep working on my inventions or just keep improving my hydroponics and robotics skills
What defines a "job"? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
It's an international standard. The problem, aside from the large number of jobs that require a person to work for only one or hours per day or per week, is the person who works such a job has to perform all the unemployment activities that a person working zero hours does, but isn't labelled a dole-bludger and belittled. It means the under-employed are never mentioned in government reporting or welfare-bashing while in fact, they number two or three times the no-job population. It is a sneaky way of giv
No, not without compulsion (Score:2)
Our safety net systems and poor educational choices have created the present conundrum of both high unemployment and record numbers of open jobs.
While some of those openings are relatively low skill and low wage offerings like food service and hospitality jobs, many more are middle skill and high skill jobs like machinists, wiring technicians, and the like.
While back in the 30s it was plausible that a government program could tell millions of unemployed men to pick up a shovel and dig a ditch from here to w
Re: (Score:2)
Our safety net systems and poor educational choices have created the present conundrum of both high unemployment and record numbers of open jobs.
There's numerous references in this discussion that prove that the safety net systems have nothing to do with it, the same situation persists in states which cut off unemployment benefits.
While some of those openings are relatively low skill and low wage offerings like food service and hospitality jobs, many more are middle skill and high skill jobs like machinists, wiring technicians, and the like.
Yep, those are kinds of employee who are legitimately in short supply. Most schools have failed badly to meet the needs of students who would become them.
There is a platonic ideal of a CCC that ideally gets these things done on a grand scale, like an Army Corps of Engineers writ large. But passing a law today won't cause it to materialize. It'd probably take a decade or two before it could be made to happen.
It might take that long to fully ramp up, but there's low-hanging fruit to pick in the meantime.
Re: No, not without compulsion (Score:2)
It might take that long to fully ramp up, but there's low-hanging fruit to pick in the meantime.
Organizing and executing the effective and timely completion of anwide diversity of geographically distributed small tasks is precisely the sort of thing a centralized bureaucracy does poorly.
Re: (Score:2)
Organizing and executing the effective and timely completion of anwide diversity of geographically distributed small tasks is precisely the sort of thing a centralized bureaucracy does poorly.
And yet leaving it up to the smaller, geographically distributed governmental organizations also tends to work poorly, because of the oversight needed.
Re: No, not without compulsion (Score:2)
Perhaps yes but it's hard to disentangle the latter failure from the effect of governmental strings.
Back in the day roads and railroads and bridges were built by private actors with government involvement limited to rubberstamping the plans, if there was any involvement at all.
And government projects like dams and highways got built by states and localities (using both federal money and locally issued bonds) out west without getting caught up in that red tape in the days before the hacker's veto became norm
Quixote (Score:2)
Let's create thousands of jobs for people to tilt at windmills. There are going to be plenty of windmills, so lots of job opportunities.
No, thanks (Score:2)
We already have people doing this. They're volunteers and they already do this. What we do need are a lot of people to maintain the forests. Yes, dear snowflakes, that means cutting down some trees. That means cutting brush, dragging it into big piles and burning it. What it absolutely means is work. Hard work. Getting dirty every single day all day long. What we absolutely don't need are people going around talking about doing something and we sure as hell don't need an army of wannabe middle-manag
Biden said $45-50 an hour (Score:2)
https://www.yahoo.com/entertai... [yahoo.com]
Interesting how this one quotes $15. $25 is probably enough to move the needle, but backbreaking labor for $15 likely won't.
Wrong question (Score:1)
Wrong question. The question should be, "Can the US create hundreds of thousands of jobs?" full stop.
Economic and social conditions today are not that far from those which led to FDR, the Labor Act, the WPA, and etc. Most likely the US would be a communist country right now if he hadn't done what he did, especially with regards to Labor. The Unions at the time were threatening to go full Bolshevik and violently if need be. Today, it seems the Upper classes simply haven't learned to quit pushing when they're
Re: (Score:2)
How amusing (Score:2)
Planting trees isn't the answer to climate change (Score:1)
Thunderf00t already demonstrated how it doesn't scale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Obviously not (Score:2)
Betteridge!
Featherbedding is not a long term solution (Score:1)
This smacks of socialism and it never works past five years or so.
The first three years are a big boom in hiring with no results and then the organisation created goes into self sustaining mode, where it steps most of its resources to merely continue to exist.
how do trails prevent climate change? (Score:2)
I like trails, I try to be on them nearly every day (the dirt kind, please, not the asphalt ones). But I don't see what building them has to do with climate change. Or restoring streams or digging ditches or preventing forest fires or rehabilitating burned off land or thinning dead trees or almost anything else they mention (with the exception of installing solar panels). All (mostly) good things, but it makes as much sense to say that doing these things combats climate change as it does to blame the los
National Alternative Power Agencies (Score:1)
Good start. Good intention but to be not thrown under the next political bus it needs to be self sustaining economically and needs focus, reduce CO2.
I'd like to see governments form NAPAs National Alternative Power Agencies, publicly funded, fast tracked through red tape, and prioritised through law in the supply chain for resources. The agencies exploit your most obvious alternative energy choices, in US, cover your deserts in solar panels and sell energy to consumers in competition with existing energy su
money (Score:2)
This is a scam (Score:2)
Oh, do we have a job shortage? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"I know you are but what am I
All the way down."
Only turtles there, dude.
Re: (Score:2)
Only turtles there
I know you are but what am I?