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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

This is surprising considering it's in the US. Would be worth studying how it happened and how it managed to survive so many republican presidents.

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IIRC, it was started as part of the large antipoverty efforts that began in the '60s. It was specifically meant to help reduce the rate of unemployment in young people.

It was basically the modern (at the time) version of a similar program used to help recover from the great depression.

Politically, it meshes well with the ideals of both the right and the left[1], which I think is why it remains largely considered a good thing regardless of your political bent.

[1] Americans tend to forget, especially lately, that the right and the left agree on far more things than they disagree on.

Exactly. It was meant to get young men and women through a high school diploma or GED, to get them vocational training, and to give them life skills needed to be independent.

It was an alternative to pure-play unemployment or welfare.

2024 will be the 60th Anniversary of the program.

https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2014/09/26/usda-marks-50th-a...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37167202

Doesn't surprise me. Not sure what stereotypical Republican you have in your mind, but I'd assume it's the kids that hate government assistance like food stamps.

They hate government programs that promote lifelong government assistance and discourage work for those they think shouldn't need it.

This government program is literally the opposite long term goal: it encourages work, and hopes to reduce government assistance after this one-time program is finished.

And, at the same time, countless public schools don't offer free meals for their students.

ROI, certainly.

EDIT: seems like for older individuals it results in positive returns (I only glanced over the abstract): https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/29730155.pdf

> ROI, certainly.

I wouldn't imagine it's a high priority.

It seems to be for most Republicans (cf. Reagan, `starve the beast`), and while I think Republican policy proposals tend to be malicious and ideological, I also value beneficial program objectives being efficiently met for the tax dollars I pay.

"Starve the Beast" wasn't about efficiency. It was about reducing revenue without even bothering to think through to deal with that on the spending end. It was the governmental equivalent of a parent quitting their job because "we spend too much." Heck, that was the exact metaphor Reagan used in the debates (except he made it about a kid's allowance). It made very little sense on the surface, and that was because the motivation was focused almost entirely on reducing the tax rates for the wealthy.

They offered a bunch of insane justifications, including the famous "voodoo" "trickle-down economics" idea that if you cut taxes for the wealthy enough, they'd use the money to boost the economy, thereby raising tax revenue, so everybody would win. Absolute bullshit, but it's been seriously spoken of for decades like it's an actual thing with some sort of economic or mathematical backing.

"Starve the beast" really means to reduce income while not reducing spending. The goal is to pile up so much debt that future generations will have no other choice than to reduce government. Evidence is that every republican president since Reagan has implemented big tax cuts while at the same increasing spending (mostly defense) and deficits. They never bothered to reduce spending or increasing government efficiency in any meaningful way.

Correct, because it's an article of faith that government must be inefficient among a multitude of other service providers.

Efficiency is not the top priority of government-provided services. The top priority is (or should be) to provide universally and fairly, without any form of discrimination against the population that make use of such services. Efficiency is a nice-to-have, while universality and fairness are hard requirements.

Efficiency should be a target with a tight constraint of service provision as you've described. It's the dual optimization problem of providing the most service for a given goal; rather, we should agree to a level of service being absolutely required (as you've laid out) then push improvement to decrease unnecessary expenditure (IMO).

Exactly. Universality and fairness is non-negotiable.

You can try and further an ideological religion all you like, but I am family friends with a job corp director in a deep red state, they get everything they ask for from their state legislature.

… they’re not wrong though? Someone here [1] already linked to a WaPo article talking about Trumps efforts to kill it

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37167202

Despite some success, job corps have a violent history and poor track record and rampant corruption. Look it up, it's not hard to find. They don't have a very good reputation in the job employment market either. Locally, the factories teach employees welding as does the community college trade program, the latter is not free but very attainable for all ages. There are much better and more efficient ways to train youth than free tax dollars out of somebody elses pocket.

I never stated that job corps was the most efficient way to train youth. In fact, I never stated that I thought it was a worthy program at all. (I don't know enough about job corps to have an opinion worth sharing)

The parent comment strongly rejected the idea that republican presidents were unlikely to support job corps, and I responded by sharing an article about our most recent republican president's attempts to kill the program. It's not that controversial

Sometimes people write stuff like "ideological religion" about people who notice every single Repub voting against every infrastructure bill. Sometimes it turns out those same people disbelieve in vaccines and climate change, love the new X, and so on. It seems much more appropriate as a confession instead of an accusation.

Next time you can save a lot of words by just writing “no, u”.

I’m not sure you know anything about me, but I sure appreciate the ad hominem accusation of being antivax and a climate change denier. Classy stuff there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37008034#37014276

Ah, post history dig, the last refuge of someone that has absolutely nothing to say.

So go ahead are you saying the climategate emails weren’t real?

So you do understand your use of "ideological religion" was ad hominem towards that person, and hypocritical besides, since you are a climate liar ignoring the facts of climate change due to your ideological religion.

In the US it's really important to separate rhetoric from what politicians really do. Unfortunately not many people do this and media mostly is about "he said/she said" without looking at substance.

If anything I’m sure Republicans would rather we require welfare recipients to undertake a boot camp program to force them into the labor force. This seems right up the alley.

ummm, isn't that what job corps is?

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