If success is merely the avoidance of past catastrophe, then the D.C. Summer Youth Employment Program was a success this year. The program, started two decades ago by former Mayor Marion Barry, was designed to help underprivileged District teens earn pocket money while exposing them to the workplace. Under Barry’s successors, the program has devolved into a mismanaged disaster that paid youngsters just for showing up, and which routinely exceeded its budget. Under former Mayor Adrian Fenty, the program racked up a $30 million deficit that had to be covered by taking funds from welfare recipients, disabled workers and the homeless.
This summer, the program managed to stay out of the headlines and came in more than $5 million under budget. This despite the fact that unemployment for D.C. teens between 16 and 19 was 50.1 percent in June, according to an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data by the Employment Policies Institute. That’s even higher than the 48.8 percent reported last summer.
Mayor Vincent Gray apparently learned an important lesson from his predecessors’ mistakes: Handing out automated teller machine cards to thousands of kids for not doing anything — including some who were no longer teenagers and didn’t even live in the District — is not politically astute. So the first summer jobs program under his administration established much-needed screening parameters to clamp down on the fraud. The 2011 program employed 14,126 teens, half of whom live east of the Anacostia River, at more than 1,100 work sites in the city. And aside from a few reports of inappropriate groping, the program seemed to avoid the worst of the abuses reported in years past.
But it is still a “fake work” program. It still teaches youngsters that jobs are magically created through government spending. In many cases, the city is providing subsidized summer jobs that don’t even fulfill the program’s promise of a “meaningful work experience” needed to “obtain and maintain long-term employment.” The program’s 19 percent dropout rate attests to this fact.
Meanwhile, the program is funded by taxing productive businesses that employ people to do real jobs that support their families. Unfortunately, those most harmed by our politicians’ economic illiteracy are often on the lowest rung of the economic ladder.
