I was pleasantly surprised to hear Bush emphasize job training in the State of the Union the other night; it’s money well spent in a nation with chronic unemployment and drastic losses in manufacturing jobs. And then I realized I had nothing to be pleased about — this is the Bush White House, where rhetoric and reality bear little resemblance.
The president took his message on the road yesterday, traveling to Ohio (20 electoral votes) to help “generate momentum for [his] job-training proposals,” as the Washington Post explained.
Considering Bush’s record on job training, this was an odd issue for him to emphasize and embrace. As MoveOn’s Misleader explained, Bush “has recently proposed cutting almost $700 million out of the same job training and education programs he is now touting.”
In fact, as the Center for American Progress noted Tuesday, Bush’s new-found in interest in job training programs comes after the White House has repeatedly slashed job training and vocational education programs. Over the last three years, Bush has proposed at least $1 billion in cuts to job training and vocational education. From the CAP report:
* In his 2004 budget, Bush proposed a 25% cut — worth $300 million — to federal funding of vocational education.
* In the same budget, Bush proposed to consolidate job training grants to states for adult services into a single grant program, totaling $3.080 billion – a $60 million cut from the grants it consolidates from a year ago.
* Despite a 16% unemployment rate among those 18-24, Bush proposed in 2004 to eliminate all funding for the Youth Opportunity Grants — a program that provides job training to the nation’s youth. This program was funded at $225M in FY 2002; the Bush Administration requested FY 2003 funding of only $45M, a cut of $180 million. And in 2004, Bush proposed to eliminate the program entirely.
* In Bush’s 2003 budget, the president called for a 9% cut — worth $476 million — to the overall budget for job training programs.
* In his 2002 budget, Bush proposed a 20% cut in funding for the Even Start program, which offers tutoring to preschoolers and literacy and job training for their parents — right before he visited New Mexico and talked about his support for Even Start.
Oddly enough, I checked the transcript and couldn’t find any mention of this information in Bush’s speech in Ohio yesterday. What a shock.