A good idea on Slate.....~!

*The New 'New Property':* In /Slate/'s just concluded welfare dialogue , there was one obvious solution to the dilemma of hard-working single mothers who don't make more than $18,000 a year: Give them training so they can earn more. I had assumed, without really knowing, that individual job training "accounts" must be part of President Bush's high-concept "ownership society." They certainly/ should /be. The government spends billions on job training, after all. Some programs work. Some don't. Why not trust the workers themselves to figure out which ones will actually get them higher-paying jobs--as long as they know that if they waste their training money it's gone, just as if they'd spent their own funds? ....

Is that what Bush has in mind, though? The /NYT/'s David Brooks certainly advertised job training as part of the Ownership Society in a column last December , and the Department of Labor is billing "reemployment accounts" for the workers who /lose/ their jobs as an O.S. initiative . But President Bush's speech announcing his big job training initiative last spring talked mainly about *funneling money to governors and community colleges--i.e. government*--not to the workers themselves. And while Bush's GOP convention acceptance speech two months ago mentioned both "training" and the "ownership society" within a few sentences of each other, Bush was unclear on the connection. All this suggests to me that the community colleges, governors, and existing training providers are effectively resisting giving control of job training funds to the individual workers--after all, the workers might decide to spend the money elsewhere. ...

this is the kind of big government idea i like... especially when we can phase out some big government to do it.