Is Trump’s Apprenticeship Program Like His Infrastructure Program?
Is Trump’s Apprenticeship Program Like His Infrastructure Program?
It looks like it might be in a crucial way. Both involve lots of rhetoric about expanding programs that many support, apprenticeships and infrastructure. However, on looking at them closer to the extent we can see anything specific aside from the rhetoric, it looks like they involve actual cuts in funding support for existing programs related to both apprenticeships (and more broadly worker training and retraining) as well as for in-process infrastructure projects such as those funded by CIG, in favor of vague plans for some sort of private support for these programs, apprenticeships or infrastructure.
As it is, it looks like the rhetoric and privatization proposals for apprenticeships are much vaguer than those for infrastructure. For the latter we have had the specific proposal to privatize air traffic control, a proposal that has previously gone before Congress only to draw opposition from GOP senators, not all of those yet on board, along with supposed tax breaks for privatizing other parts of the infrastructure.
What is supposed to constitute the support for the private replacement for the currently publicly supported apprenticeship programs is much less clear, although one suspects that it will be the usual GOP panacea, some tax breaks. I suspect that we shall have to wait and see, which is ironic given that supposedly Trump was pushing this recently at least partly to distract us all from his self-incrminating tweets, but those tweets have so distracted his own administration that they seem increasingly unable to formulate any sort of detailed or concrete plan for any real policies, if they ever were able to do so. And this latest rhetoric on apprenticeships is just another embarrassing example of this floundering incompetence.
Barkley Rosser
Trump’s motives are simple. Follow the money. Specifically, follow the public money into private hands. He’s been making money hand over fist by keeping his wife and son in Trump tower and spending all his golf weekends at Trump facilities. Not to mention, holding official government-expensed events at Mar-a-lago.
Trading health care, Medicaid, Medicare, VA and SS benefits for tax cuts for the wealthy.
Grifters gotta grift.
Between $911.8B spent on the military (including pensions) and $919.5B spent on Welfare, there is not much left for extensive infrastructure spending or apprenticeship programs. (These numbers do not include Social Security, Medicare, or Unemployment Insurance which, with the exception of the extension in unemployment benefits to 99 weeks, are self-funded programs.)
Warren,
“You absolute horror of a human being.”
Bringing CATO bs into this site is deplorable. As are you.
Warren,
I am not sure how you get that $919.5 billion in “welfare.” Maybe one can trhow enough programs in there to get to that figure, but the big one is Medicaid, which is about 550 billion, which is certainly large. But the next largest welfare program is SNAP, which is only 78 billion, and they rapidly get much smaller after that. Maybe they all add up to the number you provide, perhaps especially if you thrown in state and local spending as well, but it looks like a bit of a stretch to me.
However, even if that number is correct (and I am going to dispute the military number less), if one does not insist on providing a big tax cut for the rich as Trump and his pals in Congress seem set on doing despite there being zero evidence that this will stimulate the economy, it is not that hard to find some money for some increases in infrastructure and apprenticeship program spending. But, of course, that is not what he is proposing but rather cuts in spending for those programs,something I think his supporters who are hot for more infrastructure are not yet aware of particularly.
Are you for more infrastructure and apprenticeship program spending, or are you just hot to cut the spending and privatize both of them so we can get on with cutting taxes for the rich, gosh darn it?
BR,
He gets that number from CATO. Mike Konczal does a great job in refuting this idiocy totally based on cutting taxes for the rich.
“If you’ve read any conservative commentary on the war on poverty in the past week, you’ve likely seen this talking point: “We spend $1 trillion each year on welfare and there’s been no reduction in poverty.” That’s crazy! Then, a sentence later, you’ll probably see a line like this: “It’s true. According to a recent report, we spend a trillion dollars on means-test programs each year, yet the official census numbers show no reduction in poverty.”
If you are reading that second line quickly, you probably think it bolsters the credibility of the first line. It’s an “official” number, and the census and the report probably quote accurate numbers too, night? They do, but the second sentence is actually used as an escape hatch to say something that isn’t true. We don’t spend anywhere near a trillion dollars on welfare unless you mangle the term “welfare” to be meaningless, and we do reduce poverty….
The claim about $1 trillion on “welfare” is more interesting and complicated. It shows up in this recent report from the Cato Institute, which argues that the federal government spends $668 billion dollars per year on 126 different welfare programs (spending by the state and local governments push that figure up to $1 trillion per year).
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Welfare has traditionally meant some form of “outdoor relief,” or cash, or cash-like compensation, that is given to the poor without them having to enter an institution. As the historian Michael Katz has documented, the battle over outdoor relief, has been a long one throughout our country’s history.
However, this claims says any money mostly spent on the poor is “welfare.” To give you a better sense here, the federal spending breaks down into a couple of broad categories. Only about one-third of it is actually what we think of as “welfare”:”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/01/12/no-we-dont-spend-1-trillion-on-welfare-each-year/?utm_term=.45841691ac4d
Got it from here: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_budget_detail_fy17bs12017n_10404212_571_551_603_554#usgs302
$392.1B on direct welfare, and $527.4B in Medical.