Workforce Development Grants Announced in Wisconsin

• Author: Chris Remington
• Posted: 2024-07-15

America's economy is a mess in so many different ways a basic web article would never be able to adequately describe them all. Millions of people are unemployed, and many of them refuse to work. Many people are in threat of losing their homes and even having a full-time job doesn't help them keep their homes because inflation has smacked America so hard. The federal government created over $7 trillion in artificial wealth in a little over a year, most of which was funneled to the world's top corporations, and now they're planning to spend another trillion dollars (or more) on immigration into this country, while the federal unemployment benefits for actual citizens have expired and there's no new stimulus in the works. Some states are doing what they can to help their citizens, like Wisconsin's newest proposal to create $100 million in workforce development grants.

Not a whole lot is known about this grant measure to date. From local news released by state officials, these grants are supposed to be available anywhere from $250,000 at the minimum up to $10 million at the maximum. The idea here is that these aren't individual grants for any sort individual worker or even an individual small business. Rather, these are huge grants that are set to address the workforce needs of some of the state's biggest employers. Once it was clear the federal government was opting out of helping assist the mess they created, Wisconsin quickly put their own state-based plans into works.

Though this cannot be placed entirely on the shoulders of the federal government. States had their say-so in whether or not to keep their economies closed, and states like Wisconsin kept their citizens forced out of jobs for a lot longer than many other states. Plus, the fact is that this $100 million total grant proposal has nothing to do with the state's funds. In essence, all the state has to do is not waste the money or misappropriate it, as 100% of the funding is coming from the federal American Recovery Plan Act - money that was given to the states. In fact, some critics have already spoken up inside of Wisconsin about the fact that they received billions in federal money and are barely offering a tiny percentage to its citizens in grants.

Still, others applaud the grants announcement and are hopeful that $100 million can go a really long way to helping the residents there find stable, good-paying employment. The state also announced that they will be providing a second round of these grants in mid-2022, though no news to date on if the grants will be for more or less money, or how large the total pool will be.

The basic idea here is that Wisconsin was hurt, and any big business that needs help with internal infrastructure or attracting more employees, or even paying employees more, can apply through the state to receive these grants.

Where Did All the Money Go?

As mentioned very briefly above, the United States federal government created over $7 trillion in new money to handle this pandemic. That's 7,000 billion. That's an insane amount of money. And, generally speaking, nobody really knows where it went. Outside of the world's biggest corporations having record years, making more money in the span of a year than they made in an entire decade, nobody can really say that the average person in America was helped in any real way. States got billions upon billions of dollars each. The people of America got small stimulus checks three different times, totaling less than $5,000 in total. So when Wisconsin is just now getting around to offering $100 million in job grants, many people want to know what took them so long to do this. We're nearly two years into a global pandemic, and Wisconsin is just now distributing funds that were gifted to them in the first place.

It's really a crazy thing, speaking of government spending in general. With $7 trillion spent by government, every single adult in America over 18 years of age could have received around $50k, or well more than a year's salary for most Americans. And the fact is that they could have gotten more, once the wealthy were adjusted out of the equation. Instead, the vast majority of that money is entirely unaccounted for.

The citizens of Wisconsin are hopeful that these grants will help many citizens get back to work, though the question will always loom in America: What happened to the money?