Retrain American Workers

More than anything else, American voters worry about the economy. Specifically, they struggle to pay their bills. Those with jobs are scared they will get fired through no fault of their own, perhaps because globalization ships all or part of their sector overseas, or because artificial intelligence replaces humans. The unemployed and underemployed are angry and terrified that they will never be able to reenter the workforce.

Their fear is well founded. The average American has three months of savings or less -- a number that keeps falling. The average length of unemployment is more than five months -- a number that keeps rising. The average worker will be "between jobs" about six times throughout their work life. It happens more to "unskilled" workers.

Workers live in a constant state of terror.

Donald Trump won reelection in large part because he recognized these fears. He focused on inflation and high prices at a time of raging economic anxiety more than Kamala Harris, whose message centered on democracy. As president, however, Trump's policies haven't done anything to ease the financial concerns of the average American.

The president talks a lot about inflation and high prices. But his policies, which merely rehash failed Reagan-era supply-side economic theory, won't help. Businesses love deregulation, but high housing and medical expenses -- the biggest-ticket bills for most consumers -- depend on structural problems impervious to changing government rules, so prices are unaffected. Republicans claim that increasing domestic energy production reduces oil prices and thus transportation and production expenses, but "drill, baby, drill" doesn't affect per-barrel rates set by a global energy market. Higher trade tariffs cannot have a deflationary effect soon, if ever. Trump argued that his Department of Government Efficiency spending cuts would reduce prices -- economists were doubtful -- but the point is moot. Those cuts turned into federal spending increases under his Big Beautiful Bill.

Nor is Trump creating new jobs. Under Trump, the U.S. is cutting about as many positions from agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Environmental Protection Agency as it's adding to defense and border control.

There is a better way.

The silent killer of the economy, and the primary driver of Americans' anxiety, is the mismatch between the credentials and skills workers have and those that employers want in order to fill their job openings. Workers have the right degrees, but their colleges didn't prepare them for current reality. Or their skills have become outdated due to technological advancements. Or they have the skills but not the desired degree. Or they're perfect but they live far away from where employers are located.

According to the Chamber of Commerce, employers are struggling with a labor shortage so acute that even "if every unemployed person found a job, there would still be open jobs." Corporations say they need H-1B visa holders and other foreigners to fill the gap.

But how can that be? Among would-be workers, 1.6 million are long-term unemployed, meaning they've been looking for work for at least 27 weeks. Several hundred thousand are STEM workers -- the same field companies say they need to fill with foreign H-1B visa holders. And 5.5 million more Americans are "discouraged workers" -- they want to work but have been rejected so often they've stopped looking. Whoever can move, retrain and reeducate those 7 million-plus people to new jobs will become an American hero.

To Trump's credit, he recently signed an executive order on workforce modernization that targets the skills mismatch. It would reallocate $5.5 billion in existing federal programs to train a million apprentices a year for skilled trades and tech fields like AI. But implementation and funding, if they happen, are years in the future.

Who will step up? As a leftist, I look to government to take a more active role in managing the economy. Jobs should be America First. As long as a single American is under- or unemployed, no employer should be able to legally hire a foreigner. The Department of Labor should ban job listings that require credentials, like a college degree, that are not required to perform the required duties. Workers who move to another state to accept a job should be able to claim a federal tax credit subsidizing their relocation expenses.

Those who most need to rise to the occasion, however, are private employers who increasingly refuse to train their new hires.

"In 1979," The Washington Post noted back in 2014, "young workers got an average of 2.5 weeks of training a year. While data is not easy to come by, around 1995, several surveys of employers found that the average amount of training workers received per year was just under 11 hours, and the most common topic was workplace safety -- not building new skills. By 2011, an Accenture study showed that only about a fifth of employees reported getting on-the-job training from their employers over the past five years." It's worse now.

Job listings tell the story: The typical employer seeks an experienced worker who can hit the ground running, no training required. Left unanswered are the questions: If everyone wants someone else to train workers so they can poach them, what happens when there's no more "someone else"? Why would anyone train a worker, knowing their increased skillset will make them more likely to be poached?

Between AI and other new technologies, we live in an age of perpetual disruption. Workers are human beings, and human beings are not disposable. A skilled workforce increases productivity. Countries like Germany fund vocational training, contributing to low unemployment and a strong economy. So we ought to make retraining as easy as possible. Education at any level -- certificate program, B.A., M.A., J.D., M.D. -- that is undertaken to pivot to a high-demand field like health care ought to be free or substantially subsidized by the government.

Government can help. Bosses aren't training workers because it doesn't pay to do so. Under the current tax code, a company can't deduct its costs of training its worker for a new trade or business, or if the training is required to meet the minimum educational requirements for their current job. Training an accountant to become an office manager is not deductible. Nor is hiring someone smart and then paying them to go to law school.

Self-employed individuals can only deduct training costs if they update or improve skills for their existing profession. As a cartoonist, I can deduct a class about Adobe Photoshop. If I create a new business, however, I can't. So I can't deduct flight classes to become a pilot.

Congress should fix these perverse disincentives to reflect our new reality, which requires Americans to change jobs throughout their lives.

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Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new "What's Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems." He co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.