Hillary Clinton to lay out plan on youth unemployment
During a visit to South Carolina Wednesday, Hillary Clinton will introduce a plan to reduce youth unemployment.
The Democratic frontrunner is encouraging businesses to hire apprentices by offering them a tax credit of $1500 per apprentice hired, according to a Clinton campaign aide.
Clinton will talk about her proposal at a forum at Trident Technical College in North Charleston.
Unemployment for Americans between the ages of 18-34 years was 7.8 percent in May 2015, considerably higher than the overall unemployment rate of 5.5 percent. For young black adults, that number is in double digits - 14.6 percent.
Clinton's proposal would require some kind of tracking, as well as certain federal and state accountability measures for companies receiving the credit. She would also build on efforts of a few senators - an example is likely the bipartisan Senate bill that Sen. Tim Scott, R-South Carolina and Sen. Cory Booker, D-New Jersey have been working on for at least a year.
One set of statistics that is influencing Clinton's campaign is a 2012 evaluation by Mathematica Policy Research (funded by the Labor Department) which studied registered apprenticeships in ten states and found that such programs have a positive and lasting impact on annual earnings.
Clinton's campaign also pointed to a mentoring and training program she announced at the Clinton Foundation last year, called Job One. It worked with employers and unions to help young people who had suffered economically because of the recession.