If You Want More Industry, Shouldn't You Train For It?

Here's a little tidbit you may find interesting. Interesting, but not very helpful. It seems that government funding for much of the training for unemployed workers in newer fields, or any field is drying up. There's several reasons for that. The obvious is that there are still a lot more people unemployed then back in 2000 when there was $2.1 billion in today's dollars allocated while now only $1.5 billion was made available for job training. And in the proposed House budget, there would be further cuts. I guess the idea is that if you got laid off, shame on you. If you can't afford to pay for your own retraining, shame on you, or maybe it's "tsk tsk, that's a shame, but don't count on the government to help you". Now if the government really does want to cut it's costs, okay, but does it really make sense to ignore the needs of the unemployed or under-educated to get better skills in order to get jobs? Does it make sense to pay for more unemployment compensation or would it be more practical to train these folks for the better paying jobs that will, more and more often, be the jobs of the future? Cutting costs is always a good idea. Especially if it's in areas of waste. But in education, whether public schools and post high school education or job skills training, cutting costs will only mean lesser education. Hey. We're in competition with a bunch of other countries to attract industry./ Industries that need highly skilled workers. So if we skimp on training our workers while other countries expand their efforts to improve their worker's skills, where would you guess that leaves us? Now a selfish person, which I know you are not, might say our workers should pay for their own training, same for any post high school education. Don't expect us to pay for it. The thing is, we just keep on paying for unemployment compensation. That or let a lot of people go hungry and have crime go way up. That way we can train and hire lots of police, thereby resolving the unemployment problem, right? But what if by paying for the education and training, we helped get people back to work at companies that came here because we had better trained workers. Wouldn't that save us money in the long run? I'm just sayin.