Today President Obama proposed a budget for 2017. It includes $5.5 billion to "open doors to a first job." Of that, $3.5 billion would be used

to create new partnerships with companies and communities to get nearly 1 million young people into first jobs over the summer and 150,000 young Americans who have been out of school and work into up to a year of paid work. 

Funds would "be disbursed to localities to cover up to half of the cost of wages for a young person." The President's budget argues that the wage subsidy would help "young people gain the work experience, skills and networks that come from having a first job."

The budget proposal isn't going anywhere, as Politico notes. Still, the first job provision is instructive. It implictly acknowledges that teenagers who are new to the workforce may not be skilled enough to warrant hiring, given minimum wage laws.

As Marketplace reports,

Thaddeus Ferber of the Forum for Youth Investment, an organization that works to put together similar partnerships to help young people find work, said the president's proposal would help make it easier for private employers to take chances with younger, less educated and less employed applicants.

Teen unemployment is a serious concern. The overall national employment rate is currently 4.9 percent, while the unemployment rate for those aged 16 to 19 is 16.0 percent. In a policy brief a few years ago, we wrote about the relationship between teen unemployment and the minimum wage in Washington.

Because younger workers are disproportionally low skilled, the disemployment effects of the minimum wage should be most visible in teenagers.

When Washington's minimum wage was indexed to inflation in 1999, teen unemployment jumped relative to teen unemployment nationally.

A simpler solution to the problem that President Obama identifies would be to allow for a teen wage that is lower than the minimum wage. Doing so would also help young people gain work experience, skills and networks — and the number of teens it would help wouldn't be limited by federal budget constraints.