Oh! My! God! What are we going to do about the skills gap?! For those of you who are not aware, the skills gap is the reason there is high unemployment. It has nothing to do with a lack of demand in the economy. The problem is that there are all these jobs out there for JavaScript programmers and there are just too few JavaScript programmers. Or circuit board designers. Or pediatric oncologists. I don’t know. Whatever the skills are, we the people just don’t have em!

The laws of economics indicate that if there was big money to be made, then people would hit the books and become expert in JavaScript. The skills gap would disappear because people are pretty reasonable and will not keep starving as TV repair men when they can make BIG MONEY as JavaScript programmers. (Or circuit board designers or pediatric oncologists.) But wait, I just got some breaking information.

It turns out those companies that want to hire loads of JavaScript programmers only want to pay $7.25 per hour. In fact, these companies that are so desperate to hire JavaScript programmers left California (where there are lots of JavaScript programmers — many as young as eight years old) because the minimum wage is $9.00 per hour. They moved to Alabama where they could pay them the lower federal minimum wage. So these companies are desperate to hire JavaScript programmers, but only at $7.25 per hour.

If I were of a cynical turn of mind, I would think that these companies claiming that there was a skills gap were actually, I don’t know, disingenuous. I would think that they are mostly conservative ideologues who want to complain about poor people and blame the bad economy on them. Because here’s the thing. I’m very poor. But I have lots of work for people to do. I could easily use two researchers, a secretary, and someone to handle my Twitter account (it really is very boring). So if I could pay these people just 50¢ per hour, I’d create these four jobs. I like the sound of that, Frank Moraes: Job Creator!

But what I won’t do is run around saying, “I have good jobs for people, I just can’t find anyone!” There are plenty of excellent researchers around, but there are none who will work for 50¢ per hour. But the “job skills” crowd never admits the truth: they can’t find qualified people to work for the lousy pay they are offering. A couple of years ago, I wrote about a guy on 60 Minutes who was complaining he couldn’t find workers who knew trigonometry. He was offering $12 per hour. And the sad thing is that these people are pretty much never called on their nonsense in the mainstream media.

This morning Dean Baker brought my attention to a shocking new skills gap, It’s Hard to Find People With the Necessary Skills for Retail and Restaurant Work. It seems that new research shows that there has been a rise in the number of job openings but a fall in the number of hires. Here are the details:

Is there really a skills gap in wait staff and motel night managers? Probably not. It is probably an indication that slightly better jobs are becoming available. But that won’t stop conservatives and even your local news from telling you that people are just too stupid and unqualified to take all the cool JavaScript programming jobs that are available. No mention will be made of the fact that most of the new jobs are bottom wrung, low paying jobs that aren’t generally considered “skilled.” (Although no one would ever want to hire me to wait tables.)

I’ll probably be writing more about this later, but I think I know what’s going on. An economy is like an ecosystem. And in this economy system, the rich have become far too successful. They are gobbling up too many of the resources, and this is causing the resources to dry up. What we need is balance. In ecosystems, highly successful species often go extinct because they consume all their resources. The problem is the shortsighted success of the species, not the fact that other species don’t have the necessarily skills to eke out a living.

There is no skills gap. People said there was during the Great Depression. There was not. They say it now. There is not. They say it as a way to justify bad economic policy. They say it as a way to justify the status quo. They say it because they don’t want to admit that the economy needs balance. It isn’t possible for the rich to have it all.

Something that I find constantly fascinating is how conservatives embrace fascists. Other than truly radical people, you don’t see a corresponding embrace on the left. In fact, if you look at Noam Chomsky (or me for that matter), you don’t see an embrace of left wing dictators. But on the right, as long as the fascist is willing to left Exxon make money in his country, he is just fine with establishment conservatives.

The best recent example of this is Augusto Pinochet — a truly vile figure. Yet he was a hero to people like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It’s very interesting. I’ve always felt that the American left’s infatuation with the Soviet Union was overblown. Most people on the left just wanted labor unions and social insurance. The left in this country has never really been radical. But even if conservatives want to believe that it was, wouldn’t this fact act as a kind of cautionary tale?

As it is, if it weren’t for the Jews and the fact that we were part of a world war against them, I think conservatives would generally think fondly of Hitler. And it isn’t exactly open to debate. Because conservatives are generally pretty positive toward Francisco Franco. And I think the reason for this is that conservatives are, at base, authoritarians. So they may have problems with bits of ideology, but they really do dream of a leader who comes in and just tells them what to do.

This is exactly why conservatives continue to adore the traitor Oliver North. And that’s why Dick Cheney is still considered a good guy: he may be wrong about everything; he may only be interested in enriching himself and his friends; he may have done irreparable damage to the United States; but damn it, he barks orders at people so he’s okay for the Republican Party! Ditto for Allen West (a classic authoritarian). Ditto for Ted Cruz. In fact, this may be the biggest problem that Rand Paul faces: he seems too thoughtful and not nearly belligerent enough (although he’s working on it).

I came upon this interesting quote about Francisco Franco from Hélène Zuber:

Franco was not exactly a conservative hero in America, but he was certainly no great villain either. But to his people he was. That didn’t matter to American conservatives, of course. That never matters to American conservatives. What matters are profits for American corporations — or multinational corporations that are largely owned by rich Americans.

Anyway, I did a Mad Kane and turned this little story about Franco into a limerick (with a slant rhyme that she hates):

I assure you that this ain’t no jive
The year was 19 seven five
   People felt no more pain
   They ran out of champagne
Because Franco the despot had died.

Conservatives are the most shortsighted people I know. Their ideas have a shelf-life of one generation at max. So they live their lives being seen as acceptable. But future generations will see them for what they really are. When Cheney dies, there will be lots of champagne corks popping!

Anyone who has read me even casually knows that I hate the game of football. It isn’t a political thing. I just think it is an incredibly boring game. If you like action and athletic beauty, watch basketball. If you love skill, watch baseball. (Although I am rooting for the Giants, watching the Nationals in the field is like watching great real time art.) But what is football? A bunch of testosterone fueled steroid-built bodies crashing into each other.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t like it. I’m not saying that it is wrong to like. And I know a lot more about the game than you might think. I understand it pretty well and I appreciate parts of it. But it is the most popular sport in the United States for one reason and one reason only: it is violent. Football is a game that glorifies violence. As I wrote recently, The Basis of the NFL Is Violence:

But like I said: I don’t like football. But Jonathan Chait does. Oh, how he does! For years, he’s been losing the argument about the NCAA staying amateur. Last year, Scott Lemieux at The American Prospect took him to task about this, Stop Defending the NCAA. And I have long wondered if Chait doesn’t really care about the football players — or at least that their needs are clearly trumped by his love of the game as a spectator.

Today, he’s back with an article that I find even more troubling, In Defense of Male Aggression: What Liberals Get Wrong About Football. As if to proclaim to the world “I’m just trying to be offensive,” the entire article is filled with pictures of football players at the ages of 6, 6, 7, and 8. But no mention is made of them in the article. I guess we are just supposed to understand that little boys in football gear is really great because they are learning valuable life lessons.

Chait is surprisingly unaware of even himself. For example, he noted that Theodore Roosevelt’s ideas about raising young men would be beyond the pale by today’s standards. But still, he noted, there are some things of value. For example, “A healthy-minded boy should feel hearty contempt for the coward, and even more hearty indignation for the boy who bullies girls or small boys, or tortures animals.” Well, in my experience, it was exactly the “strong” boys who were bullies and the most likely to catch toads and throw them high in air to watch them be squashed on the pavement. But my biggest problem with that statement is the single word, “Coward.”

In my experience, it is the most heroic man who is most likely to be called a coward. And Chait follows up the Roosevelt quote by telling the story of how he was going to quit his high school football team, because — by his own description — it was mostly about getting brutalized by bigger boys. But as he waited for a chance to talk to his coach, he didn’t know what he was going to say. He doesn’t say it, but I know what he was thinking, “They’ll think I’m a wimp. How can I tell them I don’t want to play football because I don’t like getting hit?” So Chait does what he thinks shows great character, but I think shows he was an immature coward: he does nothing. He stayed with the team.

Much of his relentlessly long article is just him remembering the glory days of high school football. And he is prepared for people like me to say that it is pathetic. So let me not disappoint: it is pathetic! And one of the people he played with went on to be a private equity manager who can “lift 225 pounds 27 times, an NFL-linebacker-like amount.” Wow. I’m so impressed! I’m sure the guy’s inferiority complex and overabundance of testosterone make him the perfect fit for a financial career that does vast amounts of damage to society.

In the end, I really wasn’t sure what I, as a liberal, didn’t get about football. I’ve never thought that football itself was the problem. I just don’t think its popularity speaks well of us. But Chait contends that football can’t be hurting society and maybe it is actually helping because we’ve become a less violent society. Of course, that trend has been going on for centuries so I hardly think that football has much to do with it.

He ends the article with what could have been the whole article:

Really?! Because I think the British at the Battle of Stirling Bridge might disagree. And Chait’s overall argument seems to be that there are good things that kids learn from football. Fair enough. And then he says we don’t really know if high school and college ball is particularly deadly, so let’s just continue on. After all, Chait has his memories of that great tackle he made as outside linebacker. And there are all those Michigan games that he enjoys watching. And men will be men, and liberals will never understand it because, well, they’re liberals.

I always thought that Chait was a smart guy. But maybe this article is more proof that his years playing high school football did cause some brain trauma.

My business partner Will is more courageous than I am: he actually watches the Sunday morning political shows. And he mentioned to me that yesterday on Meet the Press, there was some Republican ranting about how slow the recovery was. (It was most likely Reince Priebus.) This immediately got me hyperventilating. This is the reason I don’t watch these shows. Claims like this are made and then Chuck Todd (or whoever happens to be manning the spot) just lets it go by. If a Republican says the economy is doing poorly and it is the Democrats’ fault, who is Todd to follow it up with a question that took into account, you know, the facts?

For example, Todd could have said, “It’s true that the economy is improving very slowly. But isn’t this mostly because the government has actually cut spending, while Republicans have always greatly increased spending after recessions?” It really annoys me that such things are never said. Politicians can come on these nationally televised shows and spout whatever nonsense they want without the slightest concern that they will be countered.

Here is the perfect graph from a great article last year by Kevin Drum, It’s the Austerity, Stupid: How We Were Sold an Economy-Killing Lie:

Does this surprise you? Regular readers will not be surprised, but doubtless the vast majority of Americans would be. And so would Chuck Todd. Because it is just “common sense” that Obama has exploded the federal budget. The truth is that the federal government’s spending has gone up a bit, but this has been more than offset by the great decrease in state and local government spending. But here’s the point: Republicans have always known that the federal government has to really increase spending after a recession. So their focus on cutting spending from 2009 onward shows that their intent has been to kill the economy so they could take political advantage to it. This is why it makes me really mad to hear Republicans talk about the poor recovery from this recession.

Paul Krugman dealt with part of this issue today at his blog, Presidents and Jobs. It shows that private sector job growth under Obama has actually been better than it was under Bush. And this is with a huge assist that Bush got in terms of a Congress that spent a whole lot more money to stimulate the economy.

And also today, Ezra Klein wrote, This Chart Proves the Economy Is Actually, Really, Finally Getting Better. And this is the chart:

Of course, let’s not start dancing in the streets. As Dean Baker would point out if he were writing this article, adding 250,000 per month is good but it isn’t great. And given how many jobs were lost after the financial crisis of 2008, we really do need to be doing better. But the fact remains that the speed of job growth continues to increase. So things are getting better. And the same Republicans who are complaining that job growth of 250,000 per month is too low were the the same ones who were trumpeting 150,000 jobs per month as a great thing in 2004 under Bush. Even Bush’s best year was substantially below this year. But here are the facts:

1. The economy is creating jobs a decent rate.
2. The reason we haven’t seen better job creation is because of Republican obstruction.

It’s bad enough that Republicans would do everything they can to harm the economy in order to get political advantage. But it is beyond comprehension why the mainstream media would allow them to get away with it and blame it on the Democratic president. In this way NBC is not much different from Fox News.

Brian Beutler wrote a really good article over at New Republic yesterday, Republicans Are Playing Dirty Tricks to Worsen Democrats’ Midterm-Voter Problem. He contrasted the efforts of Mark Begich to get voters out to the polls in Alaska with the efforts of the conservative Americans for Prosperity to restrict voting by sending out incorrect information to people “and at least one cat.”

There is an obvious difference here. What the Democrats are doing is good old fashioned retail politics. What the Republicans are doing is simply illegal. Of course, they always claim that such stunts are nothing but mistakes. And it isn’t completely ridiculous to believe that. After all, for something in excess of thirty years, the Republicans have show themselves to be incompetent regarding pretty much anything other than winning elections. Still, the “win any way you can” philosophy is as fundamental to the conservative movement as anything — even going back to the Nixon administration and what they called “rat fucking.”

But let’s just think about the Bush the Younger years. Karl Rove’s great political insight was that the focus of politics should be getting out your voters. Don’t worry about the middle — the undecided voters. Of course, that strategy only works so long as your ideology has a reasonable level of popularity. In the last decade, the Republican Party has lost much of its social conservative appeal. It is more clear than ever that what the party believes in is the rich and their well being. Remember how lots of old people voted for Bush in 2004 because he was going to stick it to the fags, but once he got elected, Bush decided to use his political capital to privatize Social Security? That doesn’t endear a political party to a group of voters.

Not to worry! Now the Republicans have Karl Rove Double Plus Good: don’t worry about your own voters, just stop Democrats from voting. There are many ways that they are going about this. Sadly, most of them are legal. Or at least legal enough such that they are ending up in the courts, where conservative judges are often finding that there is no level of voting restriction that is illegal. This is because, regardless of where you find them in the government, conservatives do not believe in democracy.

That’s what was behind Karl Rove’s idea that the government should be able to do whatever it wanted with 50% of the vote plus one vote. I wrote about this is some detail, The “50 Percent of the Votes, Plus One” Doctrine. This is a typical tactic of a radical group, as I discussed earlier today. When Hugo Chávez tried to get the Venezuelan constitution changed, it lost by a very small amount. When people asked him if he was going to request a recount, he said no. He said he only wanted to change the constitution if the people clearly wanted it. Chávez had his problems, but he was a bigger believer in democracy than the leaders of the Republican Party.

So the current state of politics is not surprising. It is clear that what the Republicans are doing in terms of voting is what they are doing in every area of politics. They are trying to maintain competitiveness in the short term without making any changes to the Party. And it may work this time around. But note that it isn’t working well. Just looking at the Senate: the Republicans are looking at a best case scenario where they will do as well as we would expect given the fundamentals. The fact that the Democrats might hang onto the Senate is just laughable.

It will be interesting to see what happens to the Republicans in 2016 and beyond. Their short-term fixes have run their course. If they don’t make some real changes, they will turn into a regional party. What it’s going to take for them to avoid that is a little courage. I’m not at all sure they have it in them. I think that’s what’s behind all the chest pounding. They have to pretend to be tough because they are cowards. This year, that may be enough. But I wouldn’t want to be in the Republicans’ position. And regardless, I’d rather be in the party I’m in — the one that is betting on democracy, not against it.

Paul Krugman has seen the future and he has named it, Voodoo Economics, the Next Generation. It follows upon the news that indicates that the Republicans have a very good chance of taking control of the Senate. (See The Ballad and Sam and Nate for more details.) There isn’t a great deal of damage that the full Republican control of the Congress can do because Obama can veto most anything that comes out of what will quickly be dubbed the Crazy Congress. But there is one thing that the more nerdy of the political observers are very concerned about: the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

The CBO was created in 1974 by the Nixon administration to do economic and budgetary analysis for Congress. It has always done a shockingly good job. It often annoys this or that politician, but no one ever complains too loudly, because it is strictly nonpartisan. That doesn’t mean it is always right. In fact, it is very often wrong about its projections. But that’s the world of economic analysis. What’s important is that it provides the standard economics of any given set of circumstances.

A good example of this is that it doesn’t do “dynamic scoring.” It doesn’t make the assumption that cutting taxes will actually increase tax revenues because the cuts will cause the economy to grow so much. This is what Bush the Elder called “voodoo economics” when running against Ronald Reagan in 1980. And he was right. It has simply never been the case that cutting taxes caused more tax revenue. But oh don’t people like Paul Ryan want it to be true! This is because they want to claim to be for balancing the federal budget at the same time that they cut taxes on the rich. This was, you may remember, both the Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan budget plans. They were going to balance the budget, and the first step was to cut taxes.

Krugman made an interesting historical note. As nutty as the Bush the Younger administration was with four years of complete control of Congress, no move was ever made to turn the CBO into a partisan whipping boy. But now, it looks like the Republicans will do just that if they get complete control of the Senate next year. Krugman ended his article:

Back in 2003, Krugman published, The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century. In the introduction, he talked about Henry Kissinger’s doctoral dissertation where he discussed how revolutionary groups disregard norms. They do whatever is in the interest of their cause, and thus do anything and everything that is technically legal.

So no, I haven’t seen any evidence that the modern conservative movement cares about things like maintaining the reputation of the CBO. Or anything else for that matter. The only thing that might hold them back is that the Republicans already think in a postmodern way. Sure the CBO is highly respected by normal commentators. But the Republicans can always get a couple of hacks at the Heritage Foundation to say that your tax cuts will lead to 2.8% unemployment. As they say with global warming, “They have their experts and we have our experts.”

But the Republican thinking on the CBO might be different than that. There is still that, “Reality has a well known liberal bias.” The CBO can be depended to side more with Democratic plans, because they are based on the real world. Ruining the CBO, even if it were later fixed, would take some of the gloss off it. And people outside the Republican Party might think of it as “just another partisan source.” What’s more, destroying the reputation of the CBO could lead to its elimination. The Republicans would love that.

Regardless of what happens to the CBO, one thing is certain: if the Republicans gain complete control of Congress next year, they will do as much harm as they possibly can. That’s what revolutionary groups always do.

When I was in graduate school, it used to drive me crazy to see newspaper headlines like, “Ozone Depleting Methyl Bromide Levels Rose by 10% Last Year.” The reason that it was growing so much was that the concentration of the gas was really small. In other words, “Concentration of Unimportant Gas Rising Quickly Relative to Low Current Level.”[1] Basically, such articles were just the result of a reporter not knowing what he was doing. He saw a paper in Nature, so he wrote an article. It’s deceptive, but not malicious. There is no conspiracy. In general, it is no big deal.

But I see this kind of thing in conservative political reporting all the time. And it isn’t just a question of ignorance. It is rather a specific attempt to deceive the reader. And I think the reason that it is mostly seen in the conservative press is because politics in this country is already so tilted toward conservatism that there is rarely anything for conservatives to complain about. The supposed liberal president gave the country as conservative a healthcare reform plan as is possible. So it isn’t surprising that liberals have actual evidence-based articles they can write. In order to complain, conservatives are stuck with cherry picking data.

I remember reading David Brock’s book Blinded by the Right. The book tells the story of his life as a conservative hack writer and how he came to write pernicious propaganda like The Real Anita Hill. In his telling of it, it wasn’t so much that he meant to be a propagandist, it was just that he was never trained in how to do journalism properly. I’ve always found this contention a little hard to accept.

Maybe my problem is that I was trained as a scientist. So I have a great focus on the truth. Sometimes, while writing an article, I will find that the numbers don’t back me up. So I try to figure out why that is. It changes what I write. Sometimes, I don’t write about the issue at all if I can’t figure it out. But that clearly wasn’t the case with Brock.

The best case scenario was when Brock started with his conclusion and then went searching for facts to back that up. And he’s a smart guy and was good at this kind of thing. But there were times when he knew that he was lying. For example: when an article attacked the Anita Hill book claiming that Clarence Thomas had rented pornographic video tapes from a local video store. This was important because one of Anita Hill’s main claims was that Thomas would force her to listen to him describe the plots of pornographic films he had seen.

This was during the very earliest days of video rentals. Brock checked with Thomas and asked him if the video store rented players. If they didn’t, then how could Thomas have watched the films? Checkmate! The problem was that Thomas told Brock that he didn’t know if they rented players, because he owned his own. He also admitted that he did rent pornographic films. Brock knew, as clearly as any investigator ever does, that Thomas was guilty and that Anita Hill had been telling the truth. So what did Brock do? He just ignored the issue and wrote his defense, which was generally accepted.

What Brock did would be perfectly fine if he were Clarence Thomas’ lawyer. But as a journalist, what he did was malpractice. It was not even ethical propaganda. He could have apologized for the information he had and presented it in the best possible way. But instead, he just buried it. In his defense, I think that was the beginning of the end. I think that was the point that he realized that he was playing for the wrong team and that his position was, as he said, “a right-wing hit man.”

But the thing is, Brock is absolutely the rule in the world of conservative “journalism.” Michael Hiltzik found a recent example of it, The Latest Bogus Attack on Obamacare: It’s Anti-Innovation! It is about a Wall Street Journal article by Scott Atlas, ObamaCare’s Anti-Innovation Effect. Atlas started with the title and then found whatever data he could to support it.

Hiltzik dismantles Atlas, piece by piece. It is all about how the medical device tax is killing innovation. The whole idea of this tax is that with the increased spending in healthcare because of the law, medical device companies are going to get more sales and thus more profits. That isn’t right, so the idea is to offset this unfair windfall. So even though the medical device industry has made a lot of noise, the tax doesn’t change anything.

But one part of the whole thing stood out to me. It was Atlas’ claim that the Obamacare tax on medical devices was causing companies to move production overseas. There is no doubt that medical device manufacturers are moving production out of the country — just like all manufacturers. But there is absolutely nothing in Obamacare that would encourage them to do that. The tax applies to all companies on their sales inside the United States. But this is part of the cherry picking — in this case putting in information that has absolutely nothing to do with the subject at hand.

Unlike the reporters who so annoyed me in graduate school, reporters like Scott Atlas are malicious. They are trying to deceive. And this is because their positions are untenable. And note that Atlas is the David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. His specialty is “domestic and global health care policy, particularly the role of government and the free market in pricing, quality, access, and technology innovation.” So he’s got to know what’s going on. But his purpose isn’t to inform — it is to push a particular policy. So he’s no reporter and certainly no scholar; he’s a right-wing hit man. My understanding is that it is a very well paying position.

[1] Methyl Bromide does harm stratospheric ozone. But it is not much of a problem. It always bugged me that farm workers had been trying to get rid of this chemical for years because it is a carcinogen. No one cared. But then it posed a tiny threat to the ozone layer and suddenly people cared. There has always been a bit of a class problem with environmentalism. I don’t think we give enough consideration to this. It just doesn’t cost that much to take care of coal miners at the same time that we regulate coal. We already have the corporations dumping on the American worker, we environmentalists shouldn’t do it. We environmentalists and workers should be in league.