Is Trump's Apprenticeship Program Like His Infrastructure Program?

It looks like it might be in a crucial way.  Both involve lots of rhetoric about expanding programs that many support, apprenticeships and infrastructure.  However, on looking at them closer to the extent we can see anything specific aside from the rhetoric, it looks like they involve actual cuts in funding support for existing programs related to both apprenticeships (and more broadly worker training and retraining) as well as for in-process infrastructure projects such as those funded by CIG, in favor of vague plans for  some sort of private support for these programs, apprenticeships or infrastructure.

As it is, it looks like the rhetoric and privatization proposals for apprenticeships are much vaguer than those for infrastructure.  For the latter we have had the specific proposal to privatize air traffic control, a proposal that has previously gone before Congress only to draw opposition from GOP senators, not all of those  yet on board, along with supposed tax breaks for privatizing other parts of the infrastructure. 

What is supposed to constitute the support for the private replacement for  the currently publicly supported apprenticeship programs is much less clear, although one suspects that it will be the usual GOP panacea, some tax breaks.  I  suspect that we shall have to wait and see, which is ironic given that supposedly Trump was pushing this recently at least partly to distract us all from his self-incrminating tweets, but those tweets have so distracted his own administration that they seem increasingly unable to formulate any sort of detailed or  concrete plan for any real policies, if they ever were able to do so.  And this latest rhetoric on apprenticeships is just another embarrassing example of this floundering incompetence.

Barkley Rosser