One of the key tenets of Obama's jobs plan rests on a program that is dubious at best.

In his jobs proposal, President Obama called for a modification of unemployment insurance based on Georgia Works, a proposal the administration refers to as the "most innovative reform to the unemployment insurance program in 40 years.” Georgia Works is a program wherein workers on unemployment insurance:

have the opportunity to train with a potential employer for a maximum of 24 hours per week for up to eight weeks. The Georgia Department of Labor (GDOL) provides a stipend and workers compensation coverage to participating job seekers. Employers pay nothing to these trainees. GW$ provides employers the opportunity to train and appraise candidates at no cost. There is no obligation to hire any given trainee...

Congressional conservatives such as Eric Cantor like the program, so there's a good chance it might pass. I actually missed the debate about this from a few weeks ago -- Zaid Jilani at Think Progress has a summary of some pros and cons from the time.

I'm fascinated by the terms under which people might justify this as a good program or would say it is a failed program. Its ideology works well for people who are concerned that our workforce lacks the training for 21st century jobs: it allows workers to brush up their skills at no wages so they'll be prepared to take on a job at the end. But even a quick glance at the underlying data shows that, instead of a program to jump-start education and training for skilled jobs, it looks like the Georgia Department of Labor is running a low-skills temp agency out of its UI fund for the benefit of employers.

Do the Numbers Fail?

How would you use the data to justify taking this program to a large, national scale? There are three hypotheses I can imagine being in play, and all of them turn out to have major problems.

The first hypothesis is that people who go through the program get hired for jobs. Now the comparison to be made isn't between getting hired and not getting hired; the comparison should be between those who do the program versus those who just keep on looking without using the program. Turns out that is problematic. As Jesse Rothstein told Arthur Delaney:

From its 2003 launch to the end of 2010, some 30,866 trainees entered the program, according to data provided to HuffPost by the Georgia Department of Labor. Of that total, 5,089 workers -- 16.4 percent -- were hired by the company that trained them during or at the end of the training period. (The department says that among workers who completed the full eight-week training, the employment rate is 24 percent.)...

Census Bureau data show that in 2007 and 2008, 15 percent of Georgians who'd been out of work for six months or longer found work within one month of a survey, according to Jesse Rothstein, an associate professor of economics and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. In 2009 and 2010, the number fell to 10 percent.

So the transition from unemployment to employment looks to be very similar between those who do the program and those who don't, with the big difference being that those who do the program spend upwards of 24 hours a week working for free. Around 70% of Georgia Works participants are women. In so much as the workers in this program will have low skills and thus low resources (more on this in a second), it is likely much of their "leisure" time is spent on child care, uncompensated work in the household, or economizing household purchasing power -- there probably isn't much superfluous time to just give away to employers.

Hypothesis two, the most important one, is that these jobs require unique skills and the potential workforce doesn't have the right ones. Thus a special training period is necessary. What kind of jobs would these be? They would require more education than normal low-skill jobs. They would be jobs that are difficult to be productive in right away. They would involve new technologies, especially in manufacturing, that go beyond the normal workforce. They would cluster in the "some college" category at least.

Eileen Appelbaum of CEPR looked into the jobs data and concluded that for those who

found employment between November 24, 2009 and September 30, 2010 shows two-fifths found jobs doing general clerical work. Hundreds more found jobs as non-professional child care workers, janitors, retail sales persons, restaurant and fast food workers, hotel clerks and maids, or drivers and chauffeurs. In total, 70 percent of the trainees hired after the end of the training program found employment in these or similar low-wage jobs.

I was able to get the same data on successful job hires through the Georgia Works program for the period from November 2009 to October 2010. The total number of successful hires was 7,997, and they are divided up by NCCI code for categories. Here's a chart showing some of the major jobs types that stood out. Sixty percent of Georgia Works hires belong to four broad job categories:

What does this tell us? All of these jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH), require a high school diploma or less. They are all jobs that are "de-skilled": the types of jobs someone can go into and out of and be relatively productive at day one. Many of them are high churn, high turnover jobs. Indeed, they seem more characteristic of a temp agency than an institution that is focused on jobs that require skills to accelerate productivity.

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Next I took the top 30 classifications in the data and cross-indexed them based on my reading to education requirements and hourly wage as found in the OOH. The top thirty job classifications represent 80% of the hires of Georgia Works, so it is a representative sample. As you can see, I had trouble finding jobs in the top 40 occupations that required even an associate's degree, much less a college degree. This is the percentage of jobs by education level:

Among the top 30 jobs in Georgia Works, it is more likely that a given job will require less than a high school diploma, or no formal education, than it would require an associate's degree. They are more likely to be jobs like janitors, restaurant servers, and maids than those that require new skills and specific training unique to the new century. Even the high school level includes a lot of jobs -- clerical work, storage warehouses, drivers, retail -- that allude more to temp agencies than high-tech.

A third hypothesis is that workers will make more money if they are hired through this program than through normal job searches. In this hypothesis, giving labor away is a sign of being a non-shirking worker and employers will largely compensate back the lost hours in the post-hire salary.

That's a simple empirical question I don't have the data for. But I did notice this slide in this October 2010 presentation on Georgia Works, A Perspective Toward Job Growth and Training Initiatives in a Recovering Economy:

If, after examining the data closely, you can go around telling employers that they are saving over $20 million dollars -- savings that must come from not paying salaries -- it's hard for me to think that it ultimately nets out back to workers.

A Failure in Ideology?

Here's a cool thing about neoliberal policy: you can justify any kind of terrible proposal by invoking the idea of a market and throwing more weight on the back of that already overburdened word "choice."

So I could say, "This certainly looks like a way to run a low-skill temp agency giving weeks of free labor to employers, employers who already probably have monopsony power and labor that is effectively deskilled, with taxpayers picking up the tab." A neoliberal would then respond, "Well this program gives people the market dynamism of the choice to be choosing in the market of choice for the market of uncompensated labor, a choice market that synergizes with employer's full choice of market wages," and in our age that would somehow constitute a strong retort. Repeat that enough and the policy fellowships will just start falling into your lap.

But we have to step back and think: What kind of labor contract do we want the government creating, encouraging, and setting boundaries on? I've been discussing how our laws, courts, and institutions create the free-floating notion of a "free" labor contract. For all the talk about "choice," this program nudges people into working for free in what are likely already difficult, exploitative markets. What are already high-churn industries will now have wages depressed even further from taxpayers subsidizing unpaid labor. And the ideas that derive from it -- that the problem with our economy is that workers are lazy and stupid rather than that the fact that there are no  jobs, that employers should get more claims on work for free and that the spirit of indenture should be strengthened in the workplace -- are the ideas that liberals have to fight against in these dark times.

Mike Konczal is a Research Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

Roosevelt Institute Fellow Dorian Warren joined guest host Melissa Harris-Perry on The Last Word last night to discuss what she calls the "recession generation": young people graduating into this economic morass. And what do they have to look forward to if things keep going they way they are? Dorian's answer: "An American nightmare, not an American dream."

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It didn't used to be this way. "Thinking back to the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal," Dorian points out, "we had investment in national infrastructure, not an austerity politics." There was even a National Youth Administration to specifically tackle youth unemployment. But now, he says, our politicians "don't have that same vision."

But Millennials do. Speaking of the Roosevelt legacy, Dorian recounts his experience working with Campus Network students at the FDR Library in Hyde Park recently. "The ideas and the vision are there for this recession generation," he says, "but their voices aren't being heard in the same way." Maybe it's time for D.C. to tune in.

Falling marriage rates aren't a question of morality, but an issue of class.

A recent article in The Economist on the "sorry state of marriage in the United States" quoted Census data that show that, for the first time, married couples now make up less than half of all households. The article concludes:

Do not expect the Democratic Party, however, to make an issue of the marriage gap in next year's elections. Unmarried women voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. "You don't want to suggest to someone who isn't married and has children that they should be married," says [Isabel] Sawhill. "That is a denigration of their lifestyle."

Ms. Sawhill is right that Democrats will not denigrate those on the losing end of the economic changes remaking America. And Democrats shouldn't suggest that single mothers get married for the sake of having a ring on their fingers. Marriage doesn't solve the underlying problems.

Because the "sorry state of marriage" in the United States isn't the declining number of married couple households. Instead, the sad truth is that just like access to health care, stable employment, and higher education, access to marriage has become a class-based affair. The Economist correctly observes that marriage and the two-parent family has become a marker of income level. According to the National Marriage Project, a half century ago, marriage rates did not vary much by education, and college educated women were less likely to marry than those without college degrees. Today, the likelihood of marrying, staying married, and raising children within marriage correlates strongly with education. Indeed, for white college graduates the non-marital birth rate has stayed at 2%; for African American high school dropouts, it's 96%. In between is a steeply slanted line that links family form to education, income, and race.

The Republican Party has effectively exploited working class fears about family disintegration to peddle the message that these changes reflect elite disdain for traditional values. In their view, the primary way to encourage marriage is to criminalize abortion, discourage contraception, and bring back pregnancy as the punishment for sex (with the scarlet letter soon to follow). In response to the Obama administration's plans to eliminate the co-pay for contraception, Dana Perino of Fox News responded that she didn't see why women spending money on $5 frappuccinos couldn't spend $5 for a contraception co-pay -- with no clue that there might be women who can't afford $5 for coffee. The Republican plan is apparently to distribute Bibles and promote the Christian radio that blankets the airwaves with stories of screwed up men who regain their ability to make a go of family life only after Jesus saves them.

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What the National Marriage Project indicates, however, is that those who show up at church on Sundays are the ones who are doing well economically and maritally. While church attendance has fallen overall since the 70s, it has fallen most dramatically for those at the losing end of the economic spectrum -- and those far less likely to marry. Today, men without college degrees earn less in real dollar terms than they did before Reagan was elected president. Thus marriage becomes an unaffordable luxury for many women because they would have to manage a husband's life as well has their own and that of their children. Even for men who have regular employment, employment stability has taken a hit. A half century ago, well educated and minimally educated men worked about the same number of hours a week with about the same level of job turnover. Today, employment stability and average hours correlate strongly with educational achievement. Working class men (think of construction workers) have much higher rates of unemployment and employment instability and recent studies show that employment instability is a major factor in divorce rates. Unemployed men help out less at home than employed men, and are far more likely to abuse alcohol, play video games in their spare time, or beat their wives. It's hardly surprising that working class women conclude that marriage is a luxury they cannot afford.

A big part of the solution for the problems of the family is jobs -- more and better jobs. We also need to rebuild a safety net that encourages family stability. Studies indicate that the greater the male income inequality in a region, the lower the female marriage rates. We have created a society that writes off a high percentage of men through chronic unemployment and high rates of imprisonment for minor offenses. In The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, authors Wilkinson and Pickett show that the higher the inequality in a society, the higher the rates of mental illness and substance abuse, particularly among males.

The creation of greater inequality, the shredding of the social safety net, and the increasing cost of higher education have much more do with the changing structure of the family than Hollywood mores or internet porn. It is time that the Democrats discovered family values as an issue -- and link those values to a campaign to rebuild community in America. Republicans, the people who successfully blocked taxing people to pay their fair share and spending what it takes to build an effective society, should be forced to look themselves in the mirror when it comes to the destruction of family stability. Marriage rates by themselves have a variety of meanings, but class-based increases in family instability have one overriding consequence: the creation of a less just society with diminished prospects for a large percentage of our children. What we really need to do is increase our investments in children, employment stability, and healthy communities and stop pretending that family structure is simply a matter of morals or will.

June Carbone is the Edward A. Smith/Missouri Chair of Law, the Constitution and Society at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Naomi Cahn is the John Theodore Fey Research Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School. She is the author of numerous books and law review articles on gender and family law.

Cahn and Carbone are the co-authors of Red Families v. Blue Families.

We could all use a brush up on some of the nation's most important historical moments.

In a recent article, New York Times writer Sam Dillon reports that the results of nationwide exams conducted as part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that "American students are less proficient in their nation's history than in any other subject." And there is, as Dillon notes, a developing consensus as to why this is so: "History advocates contend that students' poor showing on the tests underlines neglect shown to the subject by federal and state policy makers, especially since the 2002 No Child Left Behind act began requiring schools to raise scores in math and reading but in no other subject. The federal accountability law, the advocates say, has given schools and teachers an incentive to spend less time on history and other subjects."

That may well be so. But I want to suggest another possible cause for young people's poor knowledge of American history: kids are simply emulating conservative celebrities. And the kids are no fools. They know from the news that if you want to get ahead, if you want to be taken seriously, if you want to be a contender, if you want to be a candidate for President of the United States -- a rightwing candidate, that is -- you can't be good at history. Isn't that the lesson of the past few weeks? Sarah Palin couldn't explain what Paul Revere's ride was all about. Bachmann didn't know that Lexington and Concord -- the first battles of the American Revolution -- were fought in Massachusetts, not New Hampshire.

But while we can laugh all we want at Palin and Bachmann, the problem isn't that they don't have the facts straight about American history -- it's that too many of us don't know enough about it. And our ignorance can be politically debilitating. Consider...

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Two weeks ago, on the 67^th anniversary of the D-Day Landings at Normandy, former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican, announced that he was entering the race for the presidency. Eager to harness the Greatest Generation to his cause and strike a blow against "Obamacare," Santorum stated: "Almost 60,000 average Americans had the courage to go out and charge those beaches on Normandy, to drop out of airplanes who knows where, and take on the battle for freedom... Those Americans risked everything so they could make [their own] decision on their health care plan."

Naturally, leftwing commentators mocked him for saying it. But the progressive punditocracy missed a great opportunity. Santorum wasn't just speaking stupidly; he was also speaking wrongly. Contrary to what he asserted, the GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy essentially were fighting for the chance of pursuing freedoms and securing government-guaranteed national health care. They and their fellow Americans knew quite well that just six months earlier President Franklin Roosevelt, in his State of the Union Message of January 1944, had translated his original vision of the Four Freedoms -- freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear -- into a proposal for a Second Bill of Rights. And among the rights he enumerated was "The right to adequate medical care." Moreover, the President himself knew that the vast majority of his fellow citizens supported his proposal. Polls conducted for the White House in 1943 by Princeton's Public Opinion Research office showed that 83 percent of the American people wanted Social Security to include health care, not just for veterans, but for all Americans.

To listen to the right, you'd think the very idea of national health care was the Trojan Horse of communism. And yet a bit of history teaches that the Greatest Generation and its greatest leader -- our foremost heroes of the twentieth century -- hoped to enact it. Un-American? Hardly.

I don't care if conservatives know enough about history. But I do care that we and our fellow citizens do. For starters, we have got to be able to point out when the Tea Party right gets history dead wrong. Moreover, we have got to remember who we are. And to do that we need to not only restore the study of history to its rightful place in the school curriculum, but also make sure that the history we teach enables students to think and act as citizens, not game show contestants. Responding to equally dismal reports of student ignorance of America's past, progressive columnist Max Lerner wrote in April 1943: "History belongs to the people. It must be taught as part of the people's struggle to build a free democracy on this continent. It must be taught as the prelude to what American democracy can do and be."

Harvey J. Kaye is the Ben & Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. He is currently writing The Four Freedoms and the Promise of America: FDR, the Greatest Generation, and Us. Follow him on Twitter: www.twitter.com/HarveyJKaye