During the New Deal there was an effort to provide free education and training to a wide variety of Americans in a wide variety of fields. Many times, unemployed teachers would be hired into the WPA to give instruction to low-income Americans, thereby addressing two problems at once (unemployment and poverty). During the current Great Recession, however, the story is quite different: The federal government is more focused on cutting funding for job training programs, even as 26 million Americans wish they had full-time work but can't find it, and even as American workers are seeing their pay drop.
(All images courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)
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