Just some questions.

With college funding being cut, would there be enough space in GED programs?

Who pays for tuition and books?

If someone has a high school diploma, I would assume they are exempt from this or is there a requirement that they get additional education?

I am shrugging. I dunno, it's not my stupid idea.

But your questions suggest that anyone cares enough to invent an answer. The whole point is to poke unemployed people with a stick. That stick is pointier if there's no way for the victim to avoid it.

But it turns out that the house Republicans capitulated in their demands last night, so we don't have to worry about this for two months.

I get the problem with the stick. However, I think education for the most disadvantaged of the unemployed makes sense. I just don't think they can make it work with so many states cutting back education dollars.

And are they really so dumb to think all unemployed don't have diplomas? Apparently so.

It's cognitive dissonance. They've been praying in the church of trickle-down so long that it's now an element of faith. They know that cutting taxes for the rich works because if the "job creators" have a bunch of extra cash laying around, they'll spend it on us. Like Phil Maher's "pinata of benevolence".

When it doesn't pan out, they scramble for explanations that don't threaten the fundamental faith, so "the problem is a lack of skills among the unemployed". It isn't the "job creators" fault, the argument goes, all that money they've placed in offshore banks isn't being spent on hiring simply because the unemployed are too stupid and drugged-up to pull his levers and turn his knobs.

Every year when micogoogleappleco inc, goes begging congress for more H1B visas for foreign techies, it's the same story; no one in the US has the specialized training. But here's the deal: most of those foreigners with specialized training were educated here, and mostly in public universities.

This kind of reminds me of "The Big Lie" in the NYT. Subject was a little different but the idea is the same. The Big Lie.

If the following is true:



how can we argue that taxing the rich solves anything. We have to tax everyone and spend less.

It appears we have a lot of "big" lies.

The reason that Samuelson picked the top 400 households is because they hold as much wealth as the bottom 60,000,000 households.

The economy is stagnant because of wealth concentration. Siezing it to pay creditors (the straw-man that Samuelson has constructed) wouldn't help, because his underlying frame is that the most important thing to do with 1.5 trillion is to pay off the debt that we borrowed from those 400 people.

Instead of borrowing money from the wealthy, it's better to tax it.

The deficit isn't the problem, the liquidity trap is.

Speaking of the problems with inequality;
Bowles offers a key reason why [inequality holds us back]. “Inequality breeds conflict, and conflict breeds wasted resources,” he says.
In short, in a very unequal society, the people at the top have to spend a lot of time and energy keeping the lower classes obedient and productive.
Inequality leads to an excess of what Bowles calls “guard labor.” In a 2007 paper on the subject (working paper here), he and co-author Arjun Jayadev, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, make an astonishing claim: Roughly 1 in 4 Americans is employed to keep fellow citizens in line and protect private wealth from would-be Robin Hoods.
The job descriptions of guard labor range from “imposing work discipline”—think of the corporate IT spies who keep desk jockeys from slacking off online—to enforcing laws, like the officers in the Santa Fe Police Department paddy wagon parked outside of Walmart.
The greater the inequalities in a society, the more guard labor it requires, Bowles finds. This holds true among US states, with relatively unequal states like New Mexico employing a greater share of guard labor than relatively egalitarian states like Wisconsin.
The problem, Bowles argues, is that too much guard labor sustains “illegitimate inequalities,” creating a drag on the economy. All of the people in guard labor jobs could be doing something more productive with their time—perhaps starting their own businesses or helping to reduce the US trade deficit with China.

http://aspiringeconomist.com/index.php/2010/02/04/guard-labor-why-is-inequality-bad/

One last thing;


Spending as a share of GDP is a matter of concern, but it doesn't merit the panic that it's getting.