Politics & Power Quote by Joe Baca

Baca’s line is less a plea for sympathy than a blueprint for legitimacy: name the people who fall through the cracks, then demand a policy lever big enough to look like a rescue. The triad "unemployed, underemployed and dislocated" is doing political work. It widens the tent beyond the visibly jobless to include the quietly struggling (stuck in part-time or low-wage work) and the newly uprooted (laid off by factory closures, trade shifts, automation, recession). Each category cues a different voter anxiety, but all point to the same conclusion: the market alone isn’t going to fix this.

"Cannot neglect" is moral pressure dressed as pragmatism. It implies the neglect is already happening - not through malice, but through budget priorities and bureaucratic drift. The word "dislocated" is especially strategic: it frames economic pain as something that happens to people, not something they choose, short-circuiting the old deserving/undeserving argument that often dogs welfare debates.

Then comes the hard ask: "ample and widespread funding". Those adjectives aren’t rhetorical fluff; they’re preemptive defense. Job training is a bipartisan comfort phrase because it sounds pro-work and non-punitive. The subtext is that existing programs are too small, too patchy, or too politically easy to underfund while still claiming action. By insisting on federal money, Baca also signals distrust of local capacity and an awareness of geography: if you tie training to where jobs used to be, you entrench decline; if you nationalize it, you can at least pretend mobility and opportunity are scalable.

Contextually, this sits squarely in the late-20th/early-21st century economy: deindustrialization, wage stagnation, and a constant need to reassure voters that global competition won’t simply write them off.