You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM six forty. This is
KFI AM six forty Bill Handle. Here a SCHITZI hot Monday morning, June
twenty four, and we are looking at several days of this boy across the
country. This heat dome, all man. It is usually we have a
dry heat, not so much, not so much. Today It's a Schmitz
all right. Before I get to the funding lag story, I want to
share with you with homelessness. Of course I have to do a homeless story.
I want to remind you that today the Dodgers are in Chicago to take
on the White Sox. First pitch U is five ten this afternoon. Listen
to every play of every Dodger's game on AM five seventy LA. Stream all
the games a HD on the iHeartRadio app. The keywords AM five seventy LA
Sports powered by LA Care for all of LA. Now, in terms of
I can't do a week, I can't do two days worth of topics without
getting into homelessness, because that is in many ways the number one problem here
in California. Let me think of this. Gavin newsom Ran on homelessness to
become governor Karen Bass ran on homelessness. Paul Caruso, her opponent, ran
on homelessness, and we have this horrific problem. Neil just did a story
on the homeless in various parts of Los Angeles. I went to an event
on Saturday night the Lawyer's Philharmonic. Had to go through downtown. The number
of tents that were out there. In one case under a bridge, there
was support, a potty, and there was a big tent. So that
was a two bedroom, one bath, And I'm sure that people really are
just striving for one of those. They're just more comfortable. Okay, with
that being said, here's the way it works with these homeless programs. It's
not just the government here have some money or will spend some money. These
government they don't really have governmental programs. It's governmental grants. It's outsource to
nonprofits. And there's a story in the LA Time about one nonprofit reclaim Possibilities
twenty two beds in LA and this is for men released from jail and prison
who would otherwise go into homelessness. And the owner again had to tell us
ten employees, you're not going to get paid or you won't get paid for
a while because reimbursement checks haven't arrived. Many nonprofit providers with government contracts,
which is virtually all of them other than the ones that are non governmental,
and said, there are different foundations, but this is the majority. There's
this tangled reimbursement scheme. In other words, the government pays but doesn't pay
upfront. Obviously, it has to pay based on expenses. And yeah,
here's how crazy it goes invoices go to La County Probation Department in this case,
and then the California Department of Corrections. The rehabilitation goes back to the
agencies, then goes to reclaim possibility. It goes back and forth. It
is just a complicated, god awful mess and there's no good way to deal
with it. And well, there actually is. But here's what happens with
a lot of these nonprofits. The money, a lot of it goes to
interest because they have to get these predatory loans, I mean nonprofit agencies have
to go and get these payday loans. Effectively. The answer, and we
haven't gone there yet in La County Board of Supervisors is looking at this is
to use the factoring model. What is factoring? Factoring is used in the
schmata industry. It is used in almost every industry that has inventory. In
this case, the inventory is the county that owes money. So factoring.
Let's say you have a company, you have a clothing manufacturing company and will
owe you money and you don't have cash right now. Well, I'm a
lending institution and I'm lending you the money based on the assets that you have.
The assets being money that's owed to you, and I give you the
money discount it because I'm taking somewhat of the risk and I have to make
a profit, and I charge interest on the money. That happens almost instantly.
It's a model that makes no sense as a matter of fact. In
New York, this is what they're doing and this is a model program.
There is an organization in New York CNY. I'm going to get into that
what that stands for. But when you're starting with FEC, I mean that's
a problem. Is funded by philanthropy and the city one point six billion dollars
and no interest bridge loans. And this enables these nonprofits to keep the money
to sustain their services, which if you have a nonprofit in this case homelessness
nonprofits and tell me how unimportant that is, right, I mean, all
they're all important, But as we deal with this problem, we want to
just maximize the number of dollars because it's all going to be incremental anyway.
I mean, it's going to be little bits and pieces. The only one
of the homeless, and this is one of them. And the way the
system is it makes it almost impossible for them to either get all the money
pay their employees without these insane loans they have to take out. Let's put
in the factoring system the money that the model that New York uses just a
straight business model. You've got inventory. And by the way, when you
have inventory, when the government owes you money, you're going to get paid.
There isn't a lot of bad paper there. You get paid. So
that's solid for a lender. I'll buy those loans or I'll buy that money
that's owed at a discount, and here's your money right now. And so
that's the way. It's a good idea. It's a good idea. And
are you ready for this? They're actually going in that direction. Hold on
a minute. A good idea that makes sense fiscally, and the government is
saying, yeah, we're gonna do it. Calendar that one, okay,
because you're not going to see that very often. Okay, Now I get
some pretty good news until you dive into it, and then I guess it's
very good news for some folks. I'll explain why Gen X four to one
K retirement lags. But guess what. Four oh one K balances of Gen
X workers now beats baby boomers by two hundred dollars at five hundred and forty
three thousand dollars. And this is a fidelity looking at twenty two million accounts
in the first three months of this year. Okay, xers are born between
nineteen sixty five nineteen eighty. This is the next generation torect tire behind the
boomers born between forty six and sixty four. I am a boomer and I
am in retirement age. Although you know, I don't know what you do
when you retire. I don't play golf, I don't have friends, I
don't do much. You can only couch potato as a verb for so long.
In any case, Gen X is often referred to as the forgotten generation.
Why because you've got boomers and millennials on either side. And here's the
tough part, and it's kind of a good story about how so many of
them actually have this much money. They're the first generation to start working with
four to oh one k's replacing pension plans. Now, the law the irs
allows you to have a pension plan and a four to oh one K,
And that's what a lot of us did and do. When you're in an
industry that has pension plans, and you know, it used to be that
virtually every major company had a pension plan. We don't hear iHeart doesn't allow
a pension plan or doesn't provide one, and most major companies today don't.
And it's now you're retiring and you've got the gen xers who are looking at
two things. Retirement funds they have to put in four o one ks and
so security and whatever savings they have. That is not easy to put together,
it really Isn't you take away one of those pillars. What is the
difference between a pension and a four to oh one K four one K plan
plan? Is you're investing money and in the pension plan you receive a you
receive a plan that usually the employer pays there. Now there can be a
contribution but a four oh one K plan unless there is a matching three percent
contribution, then it's your Basically, your money goes in a four to one
K plan and the employer money goes into a pension plan with a little some
differences. And we, for example, because we are members of AFTRA,
the American Federation of Television Radio Artists, which I've never understood that how we
are artists, we have a pension plan. And if you are smart,
you have a four to oh one K, which I know you have,
and if you're very smart, you put in the maximum allowed by law.
And by the way, that money is tax deductible. So if you make
one hundred thousand dollars and you're allowed to put in thirty thousand dollars, now
then you're taxed on one hundred and seventy thousand dollars, and the thirty thousand
dollars is put away and you're not taxed on it. It goes into a
four oh one K and you can't touch it until you're sixty or late fifties.
And there are a bunch of other rules, but the bottom line is
that's tax free money, or that's it's non taxable, and that builds up
over the years. Oh does that build up if you're in the thirty percent,
Well, actually you're in forty percent tax bracket. At one hundred thousand
dollars a year, you're able to put away thirty That's a lot of money
that you're not paying taxes on it, and that makes a great deal of
sense. The government lets you do that as well, it should, and
then after fifty it even turbos that up to thirty thousand, because until then
you're a twenty three thousand. I don't want to get into the minutia because
now we're getting into the weeds. But the bottom line is that gen X
workers have take have to take that into account, and it's just harder.
Baby boomers have the most disposable income of any generation ever, but we've had
pension plans which don't exist anymore now. The other thing about four oh one
case, A lot of companies will do a match in other words, for
the first three get three percent. So if you're making one hundred thousand dollars
a year, you put away three thousand dollars into a pension plan for example,
or four oh one k, the the government or the company will match
up to that much money. So three percent is typical. So you make
one hundred thousand dollars, three percent is matched by the cover by the company.
And I always say, you are out of your mind not to put
that in, because you know what the return is on that three percent.
You put in on that three thousand dollars and you're making one hundred grand,
it's one hundred percent return. It doubles because three thousand dollars becomes six thousand
dollars the moment you put it in. So there are governmental programs out there
not to give you money, but allow you to do things that eliminate taxes,
let you build things up that lets you get where you keep more of
your money, and then you pay taxes on it way later. It's all
tax deferred money. And so gen xers are actually paying attention and now starting
seriously to do this in their fifth ffties. I started seriously putting money away
when I think I was in my late forties. Had I started putting money
away when I was in my twenties or even thirties the way that it is
suggested. Joel Larsgard and I have talked about this ad nauseum on Thursdays.
Had I started in my early thirties today, you would be listening to my
assistant do this show, and I would be sitting on my ass listening and
saying, hey, good for you, as my money is turboing. And
instead I started in either late thirties I'm trying to figure out where it was,
or early forties, so I have a limited amount now I have been
maximizing it. Also, I live under my means. That's a whole different
story, so you don't spend as much as you have. They are people
that go the other way. But this is just a stat that is actually
good news for so many Gen xers. You've worked harder at it. If
you have enough money laid aside for retirement, you had to have worked far
higher than I had to have worked, and most of us boomers, and
the same rules always apply. Maximize any retirement savings and tax deferred opportunities,
anything that you can get. I think it's up to fifteen percent you're allowed
to put away in certain cases. So if you do it, you do
it, you do it now. Kno, this is not for people who
actually work here at iHeart because I don't care how much you're living under your
means. You're living over your means because well, this is iHeart. Do
I make enough fun of this company? Yes, yes, you would.
You would think that someone in management would come up to me and go handle
you know, why don't you just leave it alone for a bit? Okay?
And then I come back with You're no better worse than any other major
corporation. This is the way America does business, and that's what it does.
It's a whole new world that used to be major corporations put into their
financials pension plans and it costs the money too. Pension plans are not inexpensive
for corporation. But it's a different world. It's the beans who count the
beans. That's the way we live, all right. I just want to
make you feel good. But congratulations, by the way, to your gen
xers who have done what is much more difficult to do. All right,
Now, I want to talk about something that is near and dear to my
heart because I've got a personal story about this. And let's go back to
the nineteen nineties. All right. Globalization was happening, and it was going
to be rough on folks. Opening the economy up to imports, cheap imports
from Canada, Mexico and China. Well, that's going to hurt workers who
made and manufactured here products because it was just cheaper to buy from even Canada.
So on top of that, welfare reform eliminated a lot of money to
families, and so it was a double hit. On the one hand,
you lost your job and on the other hand, those of you who were
on welfare job benefits got less money. So Congress comes up with a solution,
the federally funded job training to help laid off workers and destitute parents figure
out a new way of income. And it made sense think about this.
Manufacturing workers would reskill for the information age economy, moving from the factory floor
to let's say, computer science. Impoverished moms would get a hand up instead
of a handout. You've heard that a whole bunch of times. In reality,
it was failed miserably. A twenty seventeen study by Mathematica Research compared people
who had gotten this federally funded job training under the nineteen ninety eight law.
It was known as the WIOA, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. And
so they took a control group and they took people who had gotten work training
under the WIOA. And guess what, thirty months later later, the training
group had zero effect, made not a dime more. Whoa wait a minute,
Well, when this thing started, you know, they didn't talk much
about it, but you have someone on the factory floor, robotics comes in
wipes out. I don't know what percentage of factory jobs used to take one
hundreds and hundreds of people to make to produce a car, Now it's in
the dozens because everything else is robotics. So who is going to hire a
fifty five or fifty eight year old worker who has been laid off and to
be retrained? And so someone gets retrained, and now you start a job
at fifty five or fifty eight and you've had no work experience in the field
you've been trained for. They never did able. They were never able to
figure that out. And so in twenty twenty two, the US Department of
Labor published a comprehensive study of this program and also similarly structured federal job training
initiatives, a bunch of these programs, and here's what they found. The
programs did manage to put a lot of people through training, absolutely and many
of those people were then hired in into in demand jobs. Then it gets
really interesting, what is an in demand job? For the first three years
after training, their wages did increase by six percent. As against those of
workers who didn't receive training, it went up from an average of sixteen thousand,
three hundred to seventeen thousand, three hundred. It was one thousand dollars.
And by the way, even that discrepancy didn't last very long. And
so why well figure this one out? Ever growing skill requirements for jobs in
the global economy, the skill level has to be higher and higher, and
the only way to really stay on is to be indispensable, otherwise you get
tossed. And here is a fundamental issue. The programs failed because they're designed
not to help the employees, is to help the employers, which in the
big picture actually makes sense. You want to be trained to do as good
a job as you can, and jobs that are needed, and since we
have a new technological global economy that doesn't need you to put on lugnuts on
the assembly line, move into those highly sought after and needed jobs in the
global economy. Those are in demand jobs, and those jobs mean that programs
that fund those jobs and train you are eligible for federal funding. And of
course that's dominated by business interests. And here's the reality. Businesses want more
make more money with lots of low page workers, low paged workers, or
low paid workers, age workers. I got that together. I conflated a
little bit. Lots of low wage workers trained by someone else, even in
a very very rudimentary setting, for example, coding, and I mean just
putting in data. I mean you have to have a certain a certain amount
of training for that. Well, it's not paid a whole lot of money.
And by the way, the training is done by the FEDS, not
by us. And that's the demand. And this started in the nineteen nineties
because the global economy changed all of a sudden. The imports, all the
tariffs were offs, and people were buying Walmart was buying only from China because
it just was so much cheaper in Mexico, and cars were being made in
Mexico and Canadian the dollar or the American dollar was strong. It just made
a lot more sense. Well, it costs people a lot of jobs,
and so one of the things that the FEDS did was create these federally funded
programs work training programs to take people who are were fired from these jobs that
were well disappeared and or were replaced by robots and train them for in demand
jobs. Usually you think about high tech jobs, HVAC, solar panel installation,
that sort of thing. Well, the reality is that that's not what
happens. I don't know of a solar company that took a quote federally trained
worker at the age of fifty five. It just doesn't happen. So what
happens, Well, a lot of them went into this training, and what
are the jobs they actually trained for? The most common job and we're talking
about You take number one, which this is, and you take the next
nine and combine them, and it doesn't equal. Number one is truck driving.
Learn to drive the big rigs. And why you think with a shortage
of drivers you'd have people all over the place. You know, there's a
ninety percent turnover in truck driving every year, ninety percent. It is brutal
work. Imagine you're on the freeway and it's bumper to bumper traffic. Imagine
doing that twelve hours a day, fourteen hours a day. I mean,
that is brutal. That's numbing work. And the entire issue of do you
train people for dead end jobs or do you just pay them welfare. It's
just cheaper. Put them on the dole, give them enough money to live
on, and if you want to work, you go find it, you
go train yourself. Now, I told you about the fact that I was
a host of the worst television show in the history of mankind, and it
was called the worst television show in the history of mankind with your host Bill
Handle and it was different topics. One of the topics we had, one
of the better ones show is I had a group of women and that was
exactly that topic. They had I don't know, nineteen kids, each of
them sitting up on the stage. And the argument was and they were all
on welfare, and they all wanted to be on welfare, and they were
taking care of their kids, which I think is harder work than actually going
on a job. And their argument was, what are you going to do?
Are you going to pay us to train and give us work, and
who's going to take care of our kids? And the cost of doing it.
Well, this is why the show didn't work out so well, because
I completely lost it. I just completely lost it. I zoned out and
started screaming, you welfare queens at the top of my lungs. I work
fourteen hours a day so you can sit on your asses and have kids and
kids and more kids, and you expect me to pay you welfare. And
they all smiled at me and said, yeah, pretty much. And I
just, I mean laid into them what you're not supposed to do. By
the way, just to let you know that, on a new TV show
talk show average first year thirty three hundred and fifty four hundred letters a week.
That episode we got over four thousand letters, every one of them laying
into me. How dare you treat these girls like that? How dare you
treat them? It goes to show you who watches TV during the day.
But the point is is that these jobs that people train for, these federally
funded jobs are for the most part, it's kind of bs. Have you
seen though? And there's some of these jobs, for example, you train
for and you get loans for this the front end office of medical office front
end turt learn to run the front end of a medical office. You know
what the front end of a medical office is. You pick up the phone
and you go doctor Smith's office sure, I'll make an appointment for you to
see doctor Smith. There's your job, but first you need a federally funded
job training program to pick up the phone and go hi doctor Smith's office.
Now, maybe it's a little hyperbole, but not a lot, not a
whole lot. You don't see daytime TV saying hey, learn to be a
dentist, get off your ass and get a federally funded work training program for
dental school. You don't see that usually. So the program, uh,
it really didn't work. And then that the dilemma is still there because how
many jobs you think AI is going to eliminate? And what do you do
with someone and I've been an employee an employer before, what do you do
with someone who is in their fifties and has no experience in the work that
they've been training to do, assuming that it's a good training program. I
don't think there's an easy answer to this one, not at all all,
right, kf I am six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You've
been listening to the Bill Handle Show. Catch my show Monday through Friday six
am to nine am, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.