You all know how much I admire reasonable Republicans. Or at least, you know how much I would admire them if they existed. For the record: any Republican who is reasonable has already become a Democrat. The people like David Frum are not reasonable. This is very simple, people! “Not crazy” does not mean “reasonable.” Instead, “not crazy” means less— perhaps, “reasonable fascist.”

Ross Douthat is a supposed reasonable Republican. How do I know? He’s a Republican and he is sometimes on Up with Chris Hayes. But unlike Josh Barro, who often makes a lot of sense, Douthat just annoys me. In fact, what most annoys me is that he is a Catholic, yet doesn’t evidence much in terms of Christian compassion. Also, he doesn’t write nearly as well as Garry Wills.

Most recently, Douthat tells us about, Our Enemy, the Payroll Tax. It’s a bit weird, because he is making sense but in the cause of evil. He says we should turn Social Security into a plain old-fashioned tax.

Yes! We should do that! If we did that, we could get rid of the Social Security cap. The problem with the way it is now is that people think of it as an insurance program: the more you pay in, the more you get out. And this justifies billionaires paying in a pittance, because they will only get what they consider a pittance out. But if Social Security is just a tax like any other, there is no justification for this most regressive of taxes. In fact, we might even be able to make it a little progressive. But for the time, making Social Security a flat tax would be a huge improvement. (And that ought to give you some idea of how awful the system is today.)

Douthat isn’t for turning Social Security into a regular tax for this reason. He thinks that by making it a regular tax, Social Security will become just another social safety net program. And this will make it easier to cut or even destroy. (Do you see what I’m saying about Douthat’s Catholicism? Forcing the old into poverty just doesn’t strike me as Christ like.)

I think Douthat is completely misreading the situation. Social Security is not sacrosanct because people think of it as an insurance program. It is sacrosanct because it is used by the elderly, and the elderly vote. So this is a fight that I welcome. Let’s make Social Security and Medicare programs like any others. Let’s soak the rich (as much as we are soaking everyone else). And let’s have this fight. I’m certain the forces of evil (Douthat leading his modern Inquisition torturers) will lose.

Bring it on.

Will sent me to this:

A couple of weeks ago, my father asked me about a 60 Minutes segment in which some manufacturing executive complained that he couldn’t find skilled workers who knew trigonometry. My father didn’t know exactly what trigonometry was, but it seemed like some advanced math. So he was confused why a job that required advanced math only paid $12 per hour. I agreed with him. Really, if such works are in demand yet scarce, surely the solution is to raise the rate of pay.

I explained to my father—who is naive in many ways—that this was an old story. The executives should be honest and say, “We can’t find high skilled workers for low skilled pay.” The truth must be that they don’t really want to hire people—they just want to complain. The truth is that if they were truly desperate for workers, they would hire smart people and train them—like companies used to.

Last week, Adam Davidson wrote a very interesting article at the New York Times, Skills Don’t Pay the Bills. He talks about the fact that employers are lying about the “skill shortage.” This is embarrassing:

Note that Isbister doesn’t just pay poorly.[1] Of the qualified people he found, he fired 60% of them because he doesn’t abide strict work rules. What could that mean? State mandated breaks? Occupational safety? I don’t know, but it is clear that there are a lot more reasons to not work for Isbister than the poor pay. But I don’t want to make too big an issue of this. Eric Isbister is just a good example of the assholes who head America’s businesses.

Davidson notes a very damaging aspect of all this fake talk of a skills gap: it is creating a real skills gap. Young people who go to school to get these vaunted in-demand skills quickly learn that they are qualified to take jobs that pay no more than McDonald’s. And so they leave the profession for something that will pay their bills—or at least where they don’t have to deal with assholes like Eric Isbister. Currently, highly skilled manufacturing workers are old and will soon retire from jobs that pay reasonable salaries. Who will be around to take these jobs? Will these employers go the way of GenMet and lower their wages in the hope that that will draw the workers in?

[1] Given that Isbister is so cavalier about finding workers, I can see how he might think of himself as the mythical job creator. In his case, he clearly doesn’t care about maximizing the amount of product he can produce. He just staffs his factory with people he considers deserving. Of course, this makes him a very bad businessman. And that makes him very bad for job creation. If he just tried to maximize profits, he would employ more people. So Eric Isbister isn’t just an asshole, he’s also an idiot.