Stimulus Fails To Stimulate Youth Job Market

One of this hidden statistics within our 9.7% unemployment rate is the 25.5% unemployment rates for teenagers looking for work. That's brutal, for not only does it act as a "disincentive" for young workers but it can hurt their career chances for years to come:

Minimum wage jobs are entry level positions. They are the first rung on young workers career ladder, where they learn essential career skills such as self-discipline, accepting direction from a boss, and interacting productively with customers and co-workers. Minimum wage positions provide on-the-job training in career skills.

But don't worry, Joe Biden and Barack Obama are here to save you, with a $1.2 billion "Workforce Investment Act" summer program that would be sure to help kids get jobs. Funny, politicians love to tax businesses to create these "work programs" and "job training programs", without realizing that these taxes would force businesses to hire less workers, thus subverting the whole idea of these "programs" in the first place.

S0 how did taxpayer-funded "Workforce" work out? Like all liberal welfare programs, it was a disaster:

More than $1.2 billion in federal stimulus money was supposed to help teenagers find jobs this summer, but the effort barely made a dent in one of the bleakest job markets young workers have faced in more than 60 years.
Despite the program's admirable goals, experts and government watchdogs say it yielded few new opportunities for teens seeking work....

"The summer program was basically half-disaster," said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. "It was too little, too late and too poorly constructed to have any lasting effect on our youngest workers."

And yet I am sure the Obama administration will trumpet this as a complete success:

Once the summer program ends this month, states won't have to show that teens actually got jobs. The Department of Labor's only requirement is that graduates be more "workforce ready," a term all states can measure for themselves.

....and so continue the program on the taxpayer tit for years to come, while teens lose out on income and experience, and the markets loses a segment of consumers and employees.

Economics, liberal-style. Ain't socialism grand?