Electoral Math
Reality-Based^TM Political Numbers from Nicholas Beaudrot

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Karl Rove's fuzzy math, part 868

Today's White House Approved Story is Bush's plan to improve job training efforts. The key talking points are:

• Bush wants accountability in job retraining programs.
• Since there's no new money, the only way to squeeze money is to "bureaucratic red tape", assuming such red tape already exists.

Reducing government redundancy is certainly a noble goal, and something that universally plays well with voters, which is why I will say again and again that Kerry needs to find specific government programs he wants to cut or consolidate.

But the real red herring is in these three paragraph-lets:

Bush proposed changes to federal worker training programs in order to double the number of workers receiving job training. By eliminating bureaucratic red tape, Bush would consolidate four major training and employment grant programs totaling $4 billion into a single grant for state governors.

This would generate $300 million for new job training under the Workforce Investment Act of 1998, or WIA, by reining in the costs and duplicate services of existing programs.

Bush's goal is to raise from 206,000 to 412,000 the number of Americans who receive full skills training each year as part of Labor Department programs established under the WIA.

A couple of talking points here:

• If the $4 billion figure is correct, then our government is woefully inefficient. That works out to $19,000 worth of spending per trainee annually. By comparison, the University of Virginia -- one of the top 5 public universities in the country, which has to subsidize food and housing for most of its undergrads -- spends $15,000 per student. Doubling the number of trainees would reduce the spending number to $9,500 per student.
• If the new money squeezed out of the job training is devoted entirely to tuition assistance, with 0% overhead, this results in $1456.31 of new money per new worker. That's less than the national average cost of a year's tuition at a community college, $1,765, not to mention books and any other associated fees. Considering that at least some money must go to bureaucrats who dole out the grants to states, it's more likely that the amount of money per new student is probably closer to $1200.
• Tution at community colleges, like all education, is rising at a rate faster than inflation. So either this program will have to grow at a rate faster than inflation, or it won't succeed in its stated goals.

The bottom line is that there is no way to increase the number of trained workers by 200,000 with only $300 million.

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Last updated by Nicholas Beaudrot on 05:27 16 February 2005