not evidence that these programs have harmed people. the largest study showed that young male who is enrolled in the jtpa programs had 10% lower earnings than a control group that did not join the program. you ve had a lot of studies that show how these summer jobs programs can hurt young people. and it s important these are not victimless failures. you ve had all these failed programs. they have harmed hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people so it s not simply wasting money. it s harming individuals and their lives. so i can just talk from firsthand experience of having run a program that put about 7,000 people to work in a two-year period. for how long? 70% of them entered the labor market at twice the income that they walked into my program and they were working 2 1/2 years later. i ve got i don t want to get too lost in this debate, because i know that you both agree that this could be done much better, which i think is
people how to work. if you look at these programs, for half a century, federal programs have given trainees nothing but false hopes. that goes back to the manpower development programs in the 1960s to jtpa, to the current programs. you ve had the same errors, the same mistakes. there is no way to make the labor department run these things correctly, and thus far, these programs have worked out better, for late-night comics than they have for the train yees. and to be clear, this is not a political bias. republicans have shown no more competency than democrats at doing this, correct? this is something i wrote about in the 1980s, actually for some liberal magazines. i was attacking the reagan administration s job training and partnership act, which was as much of a fraud as the carter administration program. again, donna, we this is a valuable proposition. we have a tremendous number of people in this country who have a desperate desire to work. we have a lot of problems in this
the history of these federal programs, it s not simply wasted money. the studies have shown that the people that went into these programs were harmed, were visibly harmed by them. they see the program, late 1970s, early 80s. that sharply lowered the trainee s subsequent earnings. same thing for jtpa. one of the things president obama is pushing is a big expansion of summer jobs programs. going back for 40 years, these programs have been shown to harm young people s work ethics. and it s certainly pob that there would be some individual program here or there that might do a good job. but as a nationwide system, it hasn t happened and there s no reason to expect the second half of the programs will go better than the first one. isn t the best system the system that aligns everybody s interests. we have problems, we have people who want the problems solved, we have people who want jobs, we just want everybody working together in a way that does other than creating jobs that are either