Friday, September 2, 2011

Tomorrow's Pre-Compromise Today

HuffPo has some AFL-CIO saber rattling trying to get the Administration to back off the idea of taking the Georgia Works program national. Georgia Works, a program that began during the recession and backed by the state's Republican Governor and Democratic Labor Commissioner, tries to set up unemployment benefit recipients with on-the-job training for up to 8 weeks of their benefit period. This is "win-win" insofar as it gives someone who is unemployed a bit of training/experience, and gives firms a free 8-week trial period for new employees.

The Georgia Works program may be a fine idea. It may be a total waste of time. But either way, it's yet another sort of thing that the White House should be offering to Republicans during the course of negotiations, not basing as the national model. The first revision of the Obama Jobs Plan isn't going to attract any Republican votes under any circumstances. So why include any ideas that are attractive to Republicans at all? Why not let them come up with a list of things they dislike, and propose Georgia Works as a compromise? Clearly the strategy of pre-emptive compromise hasn't worked so far, why does the White House think it's going to work this time?

1 comment:

Ron E. said...

I think the White House/Obama doesn't have strong policy commitments. Therefore in their mind their pre-compromising has worked because it has resulted in a list of legislative successes (ignoring the actual content of the bills):

- stimulus
- health care
- financial reform
- tax cuts / stimulus 2.0
- START
- gays in the military
- FY2011 budget
- debt limit increase

If you count all of those as complete successes, then you could see from their point of view it's a matter of if it's not broken, don't fix it.