A GI Bill for Citizen Empowerment : Job training: A voucher system would let displaced workers themselves decide what retraining they needed.

For the last decade or more, a number of reformers in both political parties have advocated a new approach to governing--an approach that empowers citizens, not bureaucracies, to meet our country’s challenges.

Simply put, we believe that as our country moves into a new economic era, the top-heavy model of government must yield to a decentralized one in which government equips citizens to solve their own problems. So it’s not surprising that advocates of such an empowerment strategy have faced stiff and consistent resistance from members of their own parties--Democrats from big-government liberals who still believe that there is a government solution for every problem and Republicans from anti-government conservatives who believe that the best government role is none at all.

Now, however, a bipartisan consensus is forming behind an idea that could give the empowerment agenda an important beachhead in the political debate. It’s a proposal to eliminate most of the ineffective and bureaucracy-laden federal job-training programs now on the books and replace then with a voucher that displaced workers could use to upgrade their skills. Its delivery system is modeled after the successful GI Bill that educated a generation of Americans after World War II.

This new “GI bill” approach, proposed by President Clinton and backed by GOP Rep. Bill Goodling, chairman of the House Economic and Educational Opportunities Committee, was recently approved by the committee, 29 to 5, with every Republican and all but five Democrats voting in favor.

In a revolutionary shift of power away from federal bureaucrats, the bill would empower workers to get the training they need on their own, transferring from government to individual the responsibility for all-important decisions about jobs and skills.

Vouchering federal programs has long been a stated goal of both Empowerment Republicans and New Democrats. Thus, this legislation offers an all-too-rare opportunity for members of Congress of both parties to discard partisan squabbling and cooperate on a measure that can help hard-working Americans acquire the skills they need to lift their incomes.

Those skills have never been more important. Economic changes engulfing our nation offer unprecedented opportunities for those with the skills to innovate, adapt and create value. But they can be brutal to those who lack the right skills. And unfortunately, our politics haven’t caught up to this new reality.

Too many Democrats deny the accelerating disappearance of traditional blue-collar work. Instead of reshaping their approach to fit a more fluid, more complex economy, they rail against economic changes that nobody can control--or press for more top-down government solutions.

And too many Republicans who tout the bootstraps approach to success are equally oblivious to the growing importance of skills. In their desire to devolve responsibilities away from Washington, their first instinct is to create block grants, which transfer power to state bureaucracies rather than to workers.

American workers deserve a better choice. And fortunately there is one: an empowerment strategy, grounded in the ethic of reciprocal responsibility. Past experience has taught us that the bureaucracy does a poor job of providing workers with useful and relevant skills. The empowerment approach would put resources for education and training under individual control--limiting the government’s role to providing information about the efficacy of alternative kinds of training so that workers can make intelligent decisions about what training to pursue. It would provide assistance through tax breaks and vouchers for education and job training, instead of directly funding public training programs themselves.

Embracing this approach is not easy for politicians steeped in the dogma of their respective parties. For the right, it requires stepping back from the notion of every individual for himself or herself--and from the ideal that devolving from one bureaucracy to 50 somehow empowers working families. For the left, it requires weaning from a powerful addiction to government entitlements for every needy group--and getting Democratic constituencies that now control job-training programs to yield that control.

Such accommodations may be a lot to ask as we enter the next presidential election cycle. But finding a solution to stagnating incomes and worker anxiety is among the most important policy imperatives in the United States today. The needs of this great country of ours demand that all of us, Democrats and Republicans alike, ask ourselves the question: “Can we make it work?” The correct answer is: we must.