The principle statement supporting the implementation of Common Core, has always been that we need a better educated workforce to do tomorrow’s jobs….

Governor Markell said it in his state of the state address on the day the DOW fell 176 points….

This has been a reoccuring theme of his;  “the education of today will not bring us the jobs of tomorrow..”

Although that sounds good in soundbyte form, it is not grounded too well in reality.  In reality, the wages of jobs have declined as the demand for work rose to become greater than the supply.  In other words, unemployment is too high… and that suppresses the cost of labor.

When one’s boss can hire one cheaper to do the same job, that is not the best time to ask your boss for a raise…..

Today, our minimum wage is being paid to college graduates and high school graduates.  It used to be paid to those who were either still students, or never did  graduate….

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Image Courtesy of Economic Policy Institute

Today! Across the minimum workforce almost 5 out of every 10 have a college experience; and almost 8 out of 10 graduated high school or have a GED.

We are already educating our lowest level of workers far above what the job market requires… There are no jobs to be given to those who will soon emerge college or career ready (SAT score over 1550), unless they first fill in the minimum wage jobs these poor blokes working now, give up when they get bumped up into real jobs….

If you bump your newly trained graduates directly into those high paying jobs, then you will be freezing the current generation into these minimum wage level jobs at which they are currently stuck…

One cannot bootstrap a educational process into producing high quality job applicants, when there are no high quality jobs taking applications…

We already have a high quality educated work force; we call it our minimum wage crowd….

So Governor. What are you going to do?
As I see it here are your options….

You have to create an industry here in Delaware.  Here is one: wind power infrastructure and solar power grid efficiency. You just make it up and go after it, hoping it doesn’t implode like Fisker and Bloom…  The difference is that with Fisker and Bloom, you said “here is some money, do something”; you left it up to them.  With this, you get Federal funding and we go government control all the way involving public-private partnerships.  We have the land, we have the technical expertise, we have a scientifically educated work force; all we need are capital and someone to direct it.

Secondly, the government needs to create high labor-intensive industries.  Areas where humans will not be replaced by robotics. Health care comes to mind. Personal care of senior citizen in their homes, is another. Food inspection is a third. Why can’t we have a public-private enterprise here in Delaware which performs the FDA food inspections for the entire East Coast? Environmental inspection industries is a fourth avenue of opportunity; testing and verification, done by the state to insure compliance of air, water, and soil standards…

As one can tell, these require more taxes.  Those who have benefited from the bounce-back of the financial markets, should be the ones to carry the rest of us forward. That would be the 1%. There are two ways to fund our future growth… A) We can borrow and spread the cost over time by increasing our debt and pay it back later, or B) we can pay as we go by assessing more from those in real time, who can afford it without denting their lifestyle….  Being a fiscal conservative, I fall into taxing now, paying now, and keeping our debt levels low.(B)..  It makes too much sense to do it any other way….since we currently have an abundance of cash in the hands of the 1% from which to draw.

The point being made through all these wishful plans, is that employment in the private sector is now full.  It will not grow more jobs on its own. It is now required of government to prime the pump; we need it more than ever.  Most of those currently unemployed will need government jobs to get back to work.  There is much to be done to our infrastructure;  we have cut government for so long, that many things are close to being broken….

We have an educated work force ready and able.  It is our college and high school educated minimum wage earners.... We need to first give them the opportunity to move up into jobs for which they are qualified to do,.. in order to make them better citizens. Playing with education again and again to make more minimum wage workers who are overqualified, is not going to do anyone any good at all…  it is just circling money around where it is not needed.