I was excited to be able to read the 40 page piece put out by Mary Burke in her jobs plan as it was a first chance to critically review her work. What I found was a sincere letter written by Mrs Burke followed by analytical refreshment with tone, pace, and language that does not match Mary Burke. Why is this important Bob, she has advisors?
Simple, her advisors are clearly writing a political piece tying outcome charts and graphs to needed programs that are ever so critically in need of taxpayer dollars. Merge that with more central planning and we've reached Mary Burke's Jobs plan. This reads like a manifesto of everything the seasonally adjusted BLS can put out without any acknowledgment of the underlying problems.
Let's talk about Mrs Burke's assertion that our college grads are leaving the state to find a job. The situation actually has much more to do with too much money in education than inability to find a job. Since 2008 our federal government has blown a $1 Trillion dollar student loan bubble in what I believe was an effort to keep young American's out of the workforce by putting them in school. We have a mismatch because too many people got degrees in humanities principally because there was money to study whatever you wanted. These college students were told there would be jobs galore as there always have been for the system is perfect and works in every way.
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Meanwhile, we need more nurses, doctors, engineers, architects and a few other careers that while offered at UW Madison are impossible to get into, all because of budget constraints we are sure.
Our youth are graduating from college at historic rates and a growing percentage are defaulting on their student loans. These conditions have sent these children back living with their parents, working at coffee shops with masters degrees, and putting off marriage. When I talk to college grads they don't tell they are moving out of state to get a job, they talk about going back to school to get training in something useful. This mismatch of intention and outcome has resulted in immeasurable waste of human and hard capital, and although it feels like the right thing to do, more money for education is not the solution to a problem created by too much money in education.
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So where should that capital have gone? As for the human capital, we over-educate in some and under-educate in certain other areas and employers will tell you that. We spend so much money ensuring everyone has been exposed to the word Heterozygous, that we ignore the positive outcome when a child pursues their interests and builds on their strengths. Perhaps our educational paradigm is in need of innovation; the current educational system is over 200 years old and was an outcome of the industrialization era long since past. We're in the technology era now and if we still believe in the motto "Forward," it's time to head in a totally new direction.
The hard capital is the tragedy in this story. In the fight to pursue the American dream the inflation of our educational system has pushed graduating student debt so high as to overload their ability to start new businesses or get a small business loan. They are literally slaves to a student loan debt that is non-dischargable in bankruptcy, and the red and blue teams plan is to double down.
Government's job is not "creating more good-paying jobs and making sure workers have the skills necessary to fill those jobs," as Mrs Burke puts it. Government's job is to ensure fair and honest trade and when fraud occurs commit the resources to go after and prosecute the fraud. The best jobs plan outside of that is make opening a business and paying taxes as simple in this state as possible.
Mrs Burke finishes her letter declaring that once governor she will, "start working to strengthen Wisconsin’s economy and the middle class." The Wisconsin Liberty Coalition's plan would be first get the government boot off the necks of the poor so they can reach that middle class.
It's about perspective, and as governor I promise to bring a new view to the problems our state faces.
