May 25, 1977
Page 16553
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act provides job training and employment opportunities for economically disadvantaged, unemployed, and underemployed persons through a decentralized system of Federal, State, and local programs.
Titles II and VI provide for public service employment jobs administered by prime sponsors at the State and local level. While title II was originally intended to counter structural unemployment and title VI cyclical unemployment, new participant targeting and projects criteria added to title VI cause it to be more focused on the structurally unemployed.
Titles I, III, and IV provide some direct employment but mostly training slots. While title I allows maximum local discretion through the prime sponsor system, titles III and IV allow the Secretary of Labor to directly attack those employment problems best administered on a national level such as youth unemployment.
Public service jobs funded under CETA titles II and VI are of special interest to the Budget Committee. The committee's responsibilities to set forth macroeconomic targets and recommend budgetary strategies to reach them include a responsibility to provide adequate overall stimulus and to target job spending on people who are unlikely to benefit from more general approaches to stimulation of the economy. The targeting provisions in both CETA titles II and VI are the major Federal vehicles to insure direct job creation in those jurisdictions with high concentrations of the unemployed.
As originally enacted, title VI was intended as a response to the employment needs of those who are temporarily unemployed because of the recession. Targeting provisions since included de-emphasize the original countercyclical purpose and tend to focus the program increasingly on the structurally unemployed. Projections of economic activity suggest that, even at full employment, as much as 5.5 percent of the labor force will remain out of work due to imbalances in the labor market. Because the economy would be operating at full capacity at that time, general stimulus would increase jobs only at the cost of rapid price increases. Accordingly, a targeted public service jobs program is the least inflationary and least costly means for responding to the structural unemployment problem.
Public service jobs such as those funded under CETA title VI are also of interest to the budget committee because they tend to target on current recipients of Federal transfer payments such as unemployment benefits, food stamps, and welfare payments. As much as 42 percent of the cost of public service jobs may be covered through savings in income transfers and revenue increases.
The relationship between targeted public service jobs and transfer programs will be especially important as Congress begins to consider strategies to provide work for employable people who are current recipients of unemployment benefits and welfare payments.
CETA title VI is the obvious model for any program that might be enacted as a work component of welfare reform. The President is now considering proposals to forge such a link between jobs and welfare programs.
Jobs funded under titles II and VI of CETA are an integral part of the economic stimulus appropriation, representing almost half of the total spending passed in that appropriations bill.
According to the Congressional Budget Office CETA will provide the quickest and greatest increase in jobs for the least net budget cost of any of the various job creation strategies available to the Congress. According to the Department of Labor the jobs funded in the economic stimulus appropriation will be created at a rate of at least 60,000 per month. That means at least 100,000 new jobs by the end of June. The Budget Committee assumed sufficient forward funding in its third budget resolution to accommodate the 725,000 jobs funded in 1977 appropriations.
In the first resolution for fiscal year 1978, Congress has assumed forward funding of $3.8 billion for public service jobs in fiscal 1979 to facilitate program management at the local level through a more certain funding pattern than has been the experience in the past. The total budget authority assumed for all CETA programs in the 1978 resolution is $7.9 billion. Any appropriations action over that level will, of course, put pressure on other programs in the education, training, employment, and social services budget category.
Mr. President, the CETA program is an important part of congressional budget policy and I will vote in favor of this authorization.