Appearing last night on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Jeff Madrick said he was pleasantly surprised by President Obama's announcement that he would pay for the American Jobs Act by increasing taxes on the rich. Jeff notes that the plan still has flaws and may not be as effective as Obama hopes, but "at least he's coming out fighting. At least he's sounding like he's for the working man and not for the wealthy guy."

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When it comes to getting the bill passed, Jeff expects Republicans to fight back. He thinks Obama will get the payroll tax cuts and small business tax credits he's asking for, since the GOP likes those ideas anyway, but he'll encounter resistance on the spending side, which gives the most bang for the buck. "We've still got a dilemma," he says, "but at least the boxing gloves were on. At least we're out of the corner and swinging a little bit."

**ND2.0 Alert: If you want to meet the man himself, Jeff Madrick will be making appearances in Washington, D.C. and New York City this week. First, he'll be joining Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro tomorrow night for an informal conversation on the state of the economy and financial reform. The event will be held at 7:30 p.m. at 816 East Capitol Street, NE in D.C. To RSVP, contact delaurodinners [at] gmail [dot] com.

And on Friday, September 16, Jeff will be appearing at a breakfast forum on financial regulation, co-hosted by the Century Foundation and the World Policy Institute. The forum runs from 8:30 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. and will be held at the Century Foundation headquarters in New York City, located at 41 East 70th Street. To RSVP, e-mail events [at] tcf [dot] org.

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.

Pundits should look at data, rather than mirrors, to find the real culprit behind the mess in Washington.

After this summer's exhausting budget and debt ceiling follies, everyone who can turn on a TV knows that Congress is sharply polarized along party lines. But most pundits are way off on what causes it.  As I've pointed out repeatedly, too many of them miss political money's pivotal role in creating disastrous deadlock. The evidence for this isn't conjectural. It's in the data for any who care to look.

Virtually all polls, including those of organizations like CBS that poll with the New York Times, acknowledge that public support for cutting Social Security and Medicare is minuscule and that the "no new taxes" posture assumed by Republicans and some Democrats is repudiated even by most members of the Tea Party (for more polls, see here, here, and here). The public is not sharply divided on these issues. Quite the contrary.

But on Sunday, a Times analyst once again tried to lay the blame for D.C. gridlock on the public. Brushing aside the importance of political money, Sheryl Stolberg instead recycled familiar arguments from various analysts who argue that you and I are responsible: "If Americans want to know why their elected officials can't compromise...perhaps they ought to look in the mirror."

Analysts and reporters need to stop looking in mirrors and start scrutinizing data. There is little evidence that Congressional polarization is rooted in sharp differences in public sentiment.

The most popular theory about the origins of polarization is the "cultural wars" approach. In this view, American society has fractured into warring segments over a set of "hot button" issues. Our highly polarized politics, runs the argument, just reflects deep differences over policy and ideology that now separate Americans from one another-- differences that some television commentators profess to believe run deeper than at any time since the Civil War. But this just doesn't hold up. Quite like false 1980s claims that American public opinion had shifted markedly to the right and that Ronald Reagan's magic powers as a "Great Communicator" had established his position as the most popular American president of all time (see Ferguson and Rogers, "Right Turn" and Page and Shapiro, "The Rational Public"), this line is easily refuted by simply aligning data on public opinion over time.

As Morris Fiorina shows in his 2009 book "Disconnect", whether you rely on Gallup, General Social Survey, or National Election Survey data, sharp ideological shifts in American opinion are not to be found. Between 1972 and 2004, for example, even the much-touted shift in the percentage of the population styling themselves "liberal," "conservative," and "moderate" bounced very little. Between the 1970s and the 2000s, the "liberal" label declined slightly in popularity, but only by about 5 points. All through the period the largest category of people who expressed a preference self-identified as "moderates," while the percentage of people thinking of themselves as extreme conservatives actually fell. As Fiorina and Abrams comment in a 2008 study: "The percentage of exact middle-of-the scale placements was 27% in 1972 and 26% in 2004" (see "Political Polarization in the American Public" in American Political Science Review, 11, 563-589).

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Time graphs of the levels of these and similar measurements typically look like near-straight lines. If Americans were really becoming more extreme in their politics, the graphs would look quite different. To the extent any ideological change at all shows, Americans actually appear to be leaning slightly leftward. On some issues, such as same sex marriage, public opinion has moved sharply in that direction.

Given the mass of contrary data, analysts intent on finding electoral explanations for polarization typically appeal to some version of political "sorting" notions. The idea is that even if there is no basic change in the trend of opinion, perhaps the population is somehow shoehorning itself into more homogeneous political units that then battle out their differences. The most obvious suggestion, again much touted in the media, involves the gerrymandering of legislative districts. This is a testable hypothesis. Many have tested it. The upshot is that while some stunning examples of gerrymandering for partisan advantage certainly exist, such as the lurid Texas case that led to former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's conviction, many counter-cases can also be found. In general, redistricting cannot possibly account for the observed degree of polarization. This actually should have been obvious all along: U.S. Senate districts have not changed at all, but the Senate exhibits about as much polarization as the House over the same period.

Many other "sort" theories have been advanced. Everyone knows that Republican strength in the South has surged. But a substantial part of the population was more conservative there to begin with; they didn't change much. It also turns out that the sharpest increases in polarization occurred in the north and east. Most studies of geographic polarization thus end up concluding that geography has been at best a marginal factor.

Complicating the story by adding references to migration -- of African-Americans from South to North and whites to the South -- does not help much, either. The changes in each party's regional strongholds undoubtedly bolster dominant viewpoints in each party by, for example, increasing the ranks of relative liberals in the Northeast and conservatives in the south and west. So differences between the parties should grow more distinct, right?

Wrong. Fiorina's points about the lack of change in Southern opinion on policy and polarization above the Mason-Dixon line remain stumbling blocks. Pointing to all the intensely partisan Republican representatives who come from the Sunbelt is not an answer, but just reframes the question.

The one form of "sort" theory with traction actually undermines the logic of explaining political change over time through it. Studies by Fiorina and Levendusky are persuasive that individuals who hold specific "hot button" attitudes that political parties choose to highlight, such as abortion, gay rights, or stem cell research, tend to migrate toward the party championing those issues. But this research also shows that the phenomenon is miniscule -- usually only a few percentage points. In reality, huge numbers of people holding hot button attitudes continue to affiliate with the "wrong" political party. Most also do not change their broader ideological label when they drift. So the overall ability of labels like "liberal" or "moderate" or "conservative" to predict positions even in most sensitive issue areas is still usually limited.

The conclusion has to be that "sorting" was a minor part of all the sound and the fury that came with polarization; it cannot be the Archimedean lever that moved the American political world. That was political money.

As I recently pointed out in the Financial Times, a tidal wave of political cash that emerged in the 1970s has washed away the remnants of the old seniority system in Congress, drastically changing the way that body operates. In its place, Congress now uses a system of "posted prices" for selecting who serves on committees and assumes leadership positions. Individual members of Congress compete for key slots by raising enormous amounts of money not only for themselves, but for the national congressional and senatorial campaign committees. These are controlled by Congressional party leaders. The leaders' control of these committees, along with the vast fixed investments in research, polling, and media capabilities these committees maintain, gives them more leverage over individual Congressmen and women. It makes crossing party lines far more costly than, for example, in the nineteen fifties.

In dividing so sharply and refusing compromises, Congress is listening primarily to those who contribute political money, not the public. As a political slogan "No new taxes" was around long before the Tea Party. It is the mantra not of the public, but of a huge swath of super-rich Americans. In an op-ed in today's New York Times, Warren Buffett readily acknowledges this simple truth. So should reporters who purport to analyze the roots of America's current political stalemate.

Thomas Ferguson is Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. This essay borrows from his recent paper, "Legislators Never Bowl Alone: Big Money, Mass Media, and the Polarization of Congress."

What happened to the candidate in sympathy with human rights advocates and labor unions?

President Barack Obama recently stood before the nation and addressed the dismal jobs report that showed unemployment was now hovering around 9.2 percent. As a part of his address, he called on Congress to "advance trade agreements [with South Korea, Panama, and Colombia] that will help businesses sell more American-made goods and services to Asia and South America, supporting thousands of jobs here at home."

Astute observers will note that Obama said these agreements would support thousands of jobs in the U.S. -- not that it would create them -- which is the traditional political parlance for supporting a policy. One reason the Obama administration has used this rhetoric around the trade agreements is because there is very little data to show that these three agreements will actually create a net surplus of jobs in the United States. In fact, the Economic Policy Institute estimated in 2010 that the Korean and Colombian trade agreements will result in 214,000 jobs lost in the United States.

What's interesting about the Obama administration (joined nearly at the hip by conservative business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and congressional Republicans) taking these positions on trade is they represent a significant departure from what candidate Obama campaigned on.

While it's true that candidate Obama never endorsed a complete about-face on U.S. trade policy -- the only candidate in the Democratic primary who did so was Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who advocated for ending the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and returning to bilateral trade -- he did engage in serious critiques and indicated that he would oppose the legacy of neoliberal trade policies.

While campaigning in the key battleground state of Ohio, Obama repeatedly called for reforming NAFTA, claiming that it cost the country up to a million jobs. By the spring of 2009, Obama's trade representative Ron Kirk openly admitted that the administration will not seek to renegotiate any part of NAFTA.

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But Obama's about-face on NAFTA isn't the only trade flip-flop the president has had. While on the campaign trail in April of 2008, then-Senator Obama said he would oppose a new free trade agreement with Colombia "because the violence against unions [there] would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements."

While the administration is now busy downplaying concerns of human rights and labor advocates about the situation in Colombia, it's important to note that the levels of violence in the country now are actually no different than where they were when Obama made that statement. According to data from the International Trade Union Confederation's (ITUC) Annual Survey of Violations of Trade Union Rights, Colombia in 2010 had 49 assassinations of labor officials -- more than the rest of the world combined. That's a major jump over 2007, when ITUC numbers show that there were only  37 assassinations, and 2008, when there were also 49 assassinations.

One has to wonder if Obama would not think that these continued high levels of violence would not make a "mockery" of any labor protections that would be included in an upcoming Colombia trade deal.

Candidate Obama certainly did not promise to upend U.S. trade policies in ways that many Americans sympathetic to the global labor and human rights movements would want -- which would involve a more direct repudiation of the NAFTA and WTO trade regime models. Yet he was a sharp critic of unfair trade agreements and expressed sympathy towards human rights concerns. Candidate Obama appears to have vanished and President Obama appears to have more sympathy with the views of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and congressional Republicans than human rights advocates and labor unions.

*Note: According to the latest news, the trade deals discussed in this piece may go up for a vote around September.

Zaid Jilani is a Reporter-Blogger for ThinkProgress and The Progress Report at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.